Rabbit Hole: Does Tim Ferriss Dream In Japanese?

In the third edition of this new experimental episode format, we explore: - Mickey Mantle's most legendary story in Yankee Stadium. - If Tim Ferriss dreams in Japanese. - How the UK would rank as America's 51st state. - and much more… Guests: - Tim Ferriss is an entrepreneur, author, and podcaster. - Nirav Sanjani is an entrepreneur and tech founder. - George Mack is a writer, marketer and entrepreneur. - Get up to 20% off Timeline powered by Mitopure (now at a lower price) at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at https://chatgpt.com - 0:00 Why Don’t American’s Use WhatsApp? 2:03 Growing Up on Long Island 3:08 Mickey Mantle’s Best Yankee Stadium Experience 5:42 Has “Literally” Lost Its Meaning? 8:02 Tim’s Japanese Crash Course 13:28 Which Nationality is Always Late? 15:15 How Vivid is Your Memory? 20:23 Why Forgetting is Actually Useful 31:28 How Easily Do We Invent Memories? 35:49 What Do Bachelors Actually Do at Night? 36:30 How Close Are We to Living in VR? 45:01 Can You Train a Photographic Memory? 50:17 How Mirrors Have Changed Human Behaviour 53:33 How Do We Find Meaning? 01:05:26 Are More People Turning to Religion? 01:14:03 Will AI Ever Become Conscious? 01:17:38 How Do We Define Meaning? 01:21:03 Are Dating Apps Dying? 01:24:01 Is DoorDash Removing Friction? 01:25:05 The Many Near-Deaths of Churchill 01:26:22 Does the US Struggle to Laugh at Itself? 01:34:46 Could Neuromodulation Cure Depression? 01:47:37 The Unexpected Side Effect of TMS Therapy 01:57:46 Could Vagus Nerve Stimulation Eradicate Migraines? 02:03:44 Are Mind-Reading Devices Coming Soon? 02:10:53 What Are Apple Going to Do Next? 02:14:33 Is AI Fuelling Looksmaxxing? 02:24:37 What’s Next For the Guys? - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  British supremacy in messaging services, we need to try and get everybody to use WhatsApp. The superior messaging system and Americans refuse to use it. Do you not think?

• 0:10George Mack?

  We was talking about this earlier as to why Americans don't use WhatsApp more. One of the theories is that America had free SMS before anybody else. So us Brits had to pay. How much did it used to be for a text back in the day?

• 0:24Chris Williamson?

  15p maybe?

• 0:25George Mack?

  15p?

• 0:26Chris Williamson?

  10p, 10p.

• 0:27George Mack?

  That would ramp up very fast.

• 0:28Chris Williamson?

  But that was why people used to use EliteSpeak, right? That was why you was there, like LY, because you were trying to snap everything to under 160 characters.

• 0:36George Mack?

  Yeah. I once, when I was 14 years old, had my first ever girlfriend. And we would text and we would text and we would text.

• 0:44Chris Williamson?

  You fucking bankrupted yourself.

• 0:46George Mack?

  Well, my dad's obviously, my dad comes down one day, and you know when you have like A4 that you'd stack in a printer? He just drops that, so on the phone bill, and I'd racked up about 800 pounds.

• 0:58Chris Williamson?

  It's an itemized bill.

• 0:59George Mack?

  Text messages, yes. So I then sent her-

• 1:01Chris Williamson?

  That's a lot of sexting at 14.

• 1:03George Mack?

  I then sent her one final text, which was, can't do texts anymore, let's do calls. So we did calls all the time. Next, next month. So I had to pay off about 1,200, 1,300 pounds of, of debt to my father.

• 1:16Tim Ferriss?

  Still paying it off.

• 1:17George Mack?

  Payment, payment plan.

• 1:19Chris Williamson?

  Dad, you're cockblocking me.

• 1:20George Mack?

  So that's how WhatsApp-

• 1:21Chris Williamson?

  I'm 14, I'm trying to get, I'm trying to get my cred up. But yeah, I just, WhatsApp's the superior, Tim uses WhatsApp. Tim's good on WhatsApp.

• 1:27Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, look, I use every new inbox that is slowly eroding the sanity of everybody who's listening to this.

• 1:35Speaker 03

  Did you guys see the Nikita Beard tweet a long time ago? It feels like, he said something like, every time I use WhatsApp, it feels like I landed in a third world country.

• 1:44Chris Williamson?

  You're allowed to say that.

• 1:46Speaker 03

  Okay, fair enough.

• 1:46Chris Williamson?

  You're allowed to say that.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  But no, I'm really-

• 1:48Chris Williamson?

  We race swapped-

• 1:48Tim Ferriss?

  I dropped on Long Island, I think I'm allowed to say it too.

• 1:50Chris Williamson?

  We race swapped Sean for you.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  Fair enough.

• 1:53Chris Williamson?

  That's the primary reason.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  I think I'm sitting in the same spot too.

• 1:55Chris Williamson?

  That's correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People are like, Sean, you've lost weight and the beard's gone.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  This is the designated seat for the minority.

• 2:03Chris Williamson?

  You grew up on Long Island? I didn't know that. Why?

• 2:06Tim Ferriss?

  Oh yeah, way up I'm on, talk. Back when there were potato farms.

• 2:10Chris Williamson?

  That explains a lot.

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  That has changed. Now there are nightclubs that make all the locals crazy, but yes.

• 2:14Chris Williamson?

  So is that beyond the Hamptons?

• 2:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Montauk is the end of the line. So if you take Long Island Railroad out from New York City, it will end in Montauk. And it was, it was perfectly fine place to grow up. I didn't realize how strange it was until I got older because.

• 2:30Chris Williamson?

  Why is it strange?

• 2:31Tim Ferriss?

  Well, when you're growing up, what is around you is normal because even a reference point, but you're growing up in a location where you have a barbell of income and wealth distribution, right? So you've got

• 2:46Tim Ferriss?

  all of the, let's just say the broad Hamptons that people know, which would have like the hundred million dollar homes on the beach and all these famous directors and financiers and little white shorts playing tennis. And then you have, on the other hand, like affordable housing. When I was growing up, like crack epidemic in certain parts. So I didn't realize how much was missing from the middle of the whole thing.

• 3:07Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Have you ever seen Mickey Mantle's questionnaire answer on the 50th anniversary of the Yankees stadium?

• 3:16Tim Ferriss?

  So this, I feel like this is the kind of question my dad would ask me. He's like, do you know?

• 3:19Chris Williamson?

  All right.

• 3:20Tim Ferriss?

  Henry Rubenstein from 1839. I'm like, no, of course I don't.

• 3:23Chris Williamson?

  Mickey Mantle describes in basically a yearbook for the Yankees stadium. It's the 50th anniversary of Yankees stadium happening. Mickey Mantle, everybody is asked, tell us what your most outstanding experience at Yankee Stadium was. And this was sold for $242,000, not long ago, a few years ago. He said, I consider the following my outstanding experience at Yankee Stadium. It's like a questionnaire. He goes, I got a blowjob under the right field bleachers by the Yankee bullpen. And then below that says, this event occurred on or about, brackets, give as much detail as you can. Says, it was about the third or fourth inning. I had pulled a groin and couldn't walk at the time.

• 4:06Chris Williamson?

  She was a very nice girl and asked me what to do with the cum after I came in her mouth. I said, don't ask me. I'm no cocksucker. Signed Mickey Mantle, the all American boy. And that was sold about five years ago for $242,000. Wow. On chain or off chain?

• 4:23Tim Ferriss?

  Speaking of hedge fund managers, I'm sure that's in the guest bathroom of some hedge fund manager's third home.

• 4:29Chris Williamson?

  It's a bargain. You don't think that's a bargain?

• 4:31Tim Ferriss?

  In Montauk or thereabouts.

• 4:33Chris Williamson?

  I don't know, man. I mean, like, baseball's got a lot of superstition, but that feels like it's taking it to an extreme.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  There's like a baseball player that had never washed his helmet or cleaned it or did anything for his entire career. Literally the helmet look, I think it's Craig Baggio, if I'm not mistaken, but the helmet was just, and he believed in that so much that it had to be that way, never changed.

• 4:56Chris Williamson?

  Seen the guys walk out and they go right glove, left glove, tap, tap on the foot.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:02Chris Williamson?

  It's, it goes from being a preference to routine to superstition to ritual to basically something sacred. It's essentially a rain dance that every.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  Or a mental illness.

• 5:12Chris Williamson?

  I think those two cross over quite a bit.

• 5:14Tim Ferriss?

  To all of my mental illness as a rain dance from now on.

• 5:20Chris Williamson?

  I'm going to take these suckers off. That's enough, that's enough fucking POV porn, which actually was the reason that we wore these when we had a Bonnie Blue on the podcast. So we could put POV in the title of the episode. Has she done one of those with PO, with these? I'm sure if you go dark enough and deep enough into the OnlyFans rabbit hole, you can find whatever you need.

• 5:38George Mack?

  Let me take my toothpick out of my mouth before I address the table. One of the things that I've been fascinated with for a while, I know you have as well, Christopher, I don't know about you two gentlemen. But etymologies of everything. So I was trying to rank my favorite etymologies or history of certain parts of language. One of them is not English, but it's Malaysian. And in Malaysian culture, they use double rather than plural. So rather than tables, they will use table, table, which is one of my favorite things.

• 6:10Chris Williamson?

  What if it's three?

• 6:12George Mack?

  So it doesn't scale. So it doesn't go.

• 6:14Chris Williamson?

  Would be a nightmare if you're a table factory maker.

• 6:17George Mack?

  The same way we just use plural, we'll say tables, we could say four tables. They would say, I assume the number, then table, table. She's such a more fun way of saying things.

• 6:29Tim Ferriss?

  It's the same in Indonesian also.

• 6:31George Mack?

  Yes.

• 6:31Tim Ferriss?

  Like Orang Hutan, man of the forest, Orang Orang is men, right? Man, men.

• 6:36George Mack?

  Man of the men, that's something different.

• 6:38Tim Ferriss?

  Well, not a man of the man, I think that's

• 6:41George Mack?

  Something different.

• 6:42Tim Ferriss?

  Your biopic.

• 6:46George Mack?

  But it's, it's so much better than.

• 6:48Tim Ferriss?

  A lot of heavy editing.

• 6:52George Mack?

  One of my favorite ones, though, is the word soon. So the word soon, I will be there soon, was the Anglo-Saxon word for now. But because so many people kept saying, I'll do that soon and didn't do it then. We then created the word now to replace it and soon is what it is today.

• 7:13Chris Williamson?

  It's soon got shifted down in terms of how urgent it means.

• 7:17George Mack?

  Generation by generation. What's interesting, now, now has that effect. Where if somebody says, I'll do that now, you don't really take them literally unless they say, I'll do that immediately now.

• 7:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 7:29George Mack?

  So it's interesting that you're seeing this drifting of now, now occur as well.

• 7:33Chris Williamson?

  I wonder if literally is the same as that. Cause when people say literally, they don't mean literally. I literally couldn't believe it.

• 7:40George Mack?

  Exactly.

• 7:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, no, you could believe it.

• 7:43George Mack?

  Yes.

• 7:43Chris Williamson?

  Which is the entire point.

• 7:45George Mack?

  My friend Alessio, he's Italian and he talks about how he has a different personality when he's speaking in Italian. The Swedish writer Henrik Carlsson, a friend of mine, he talks about how he can access different thoughts in Swedish rather than English.

• 8:02Chris Williamson?

  You speak multiple languages.

• 8:04George Mack?

  Yeah, what's Japanese Tim like?

• 8:07Tim Ferriss?

  Lot more polite, curses less than Long Island.

• 8:10Speaker 03

  Are you totally fluid in Japanese?

• 8:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I can speak Japanese.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 8:13Chris Williamson?

  What's the story of learning that?

• 8:16Tim Ferriss?

  My first international trip, real international trip off of Long Island, out of the US, was to Japan as an exchange student at 15 for a year. I went from. East Coast to Tokyo. And it took me about three weeks just to accept that I was in Japan because I couldn't believe it.

• 8:35Tim Ferriss?

  That's how that happened and it just stuck. I was there for a year. I went to a Japanese school. All of my classes in Japanese, I misunderstood what I was told before getting there, which was you're going to have Japanese lessons. And I was like, oh, great. Like Japanese language lessons. And they're like, here's your class schedule. And I was like, I can't read any of this. And they're like physics, world history.

• 8:59Chris Williamson?

  My lessons are going to be in Japanese. I'm not going to have lessons about.

• 9:03Tim Ferriss?

  So that will, especially I was lucky because this was pre-smartphone, internet, not much to speak of. So I could not, coming back to WhatsApp, right? I couldn't procrastinate or avoid learning Japanese by constantly communicating with anyone in English.

• 9:19Chris Williamson?

  There was no escape. There was total immersion. That seems to be, I get it. People go and do university courses in Spanish and stuff. And it's not just the language. Sometimes they're learning about the history and the culture and other stuff like that. But if you're trying to learn a language, and I did in school, we have to do at least one language in our GCSEs typically, the 11 to 16s in the UK. And I did Spanish and apart from the most basic stuff that I've probably remembered because I've gone back out to the country, I basically learned nothing. It would be, if you just wanted people to learn a language, doing a six-week immersion would, what, teach you maybe the same as a year of weekly classes?

• 9:57Tim Ferriss?

  You could do a year in six weeks, no problem. There's a, there's a method called the Michelle Thomas method. And Michelle Thomas, male, was Holocaust survivor, then became an intelligence officer, ended up speaking five or six different languages and developed a method of getting people up to basic conversational fluency in a week.

• 10:24Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 10:24Tim Ferriss?

  In a rush, in a weekend, in terms of giving them the scaffolding of the graph, the grammar and so forth. But it's a lot like learning some type of very fine motor skill. Or if you wanted to learn how to play tennis, like if you're playing once a month, you're never going to learn tennis. Even once a week, you're just not getting the density of practice and the reinforcement for you to go from the like.

• 10:48Tim Ferriss?

  Unconscious incompetence to conscious competence, et cetera, et cetera. Right. You're just not getting the proper density. So languages, I think you can learn languages a lot faster as an adult than you can as a kid, actually.

• 10:59George Mack?

  Why?

• 11:00Tim Ferriss?

  Because you already have the base layer of labeling and concepts and so on. And different types of abstraction in the form of, let's just say, grammar or a subjunctive. Let's say, if you had a million dollars, what would you do? Or like a hypothetical that is counterfactual. These types of things, I can explain that to you. You can't explain that to a three year old. When's the last time you talked to a three year old? They're not actually very good at speaking a given language. The reason that people mistakenly believe that kids learn faster is because the kids have no choice. The kids have no mortgage, the kids have no job.

• 11:40George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 11:40Tim Ferriss?

  It's just like

• 11:41George Mack?

  Forced into immersion.

• 11:42Tim Ferriss?

  You have no choice.

• 11:43George Mack?

  Have you heard Nassim Taleb's description of how to learn a language? Said the best way to learn Russian is to go into a Russian jail.

• 11:52Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, that's a harsh trade.

• 11:53George Mack?

  Quickest way.

• 11:54Tim Ferriss?

  That's a harsh trade.

• 11:54George Mack?

  Quickest way. Yeah, yeah, true. Life or death scenario.

• 11:57Tim Ferriss?

  You have to really want to learn Russian.

• 11:58George Mack?

  But you will, you will learn. Do you, do you think, can you think in Japanese, Tim?

• 12:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I would say that there's typically an English interface. But when I was in Japan for a year and then came back to the US, it took me about a month to get back to speaking English. You know, like I remember the first few days when my mom would come in and wake me up and I would just start speaking to her in Japanese in this daze. And it took a while to get back to things. The, the soon is pretty funny, the etymology of that. And it makes me wonder if the, much like, let's say Eskimos and snow, right? Or Hawaiians and water or whatever. That it depends on the historical.

• 12:44Tim Ferriss?

  Punctuality of a culture.

• 12:45Chris Williamson?

  You're gonna say that the Italians have got five words for soon.

• 12:47Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I think it probably is something like that, right? Because in Japan, it's like now is now. There is no second, third, fourth way to say it unless you're maybe being really polite. Cause the honorifics in Japanese, it's like 12 languages in one. If you really wanna be sophisticated with it. But I don't know if they do it in the UK, but in South Africa, they have now, then they have now now.

• 13:11Tim Ferriss?

  Just like in, in certain places in, in Latin America, they have like ahora, like now. And then they have ahora, like ahora is kinda like now, but when you get around to it, right? Or when I get around to it. And then like ahora is like, hey asshole, now actually.

• 13:27Chris Williamson?

  Actually mean it, yeah. What, uh, what do you think's the latest nationality on the planet?

• 13:33Tim Ferriss?

  Brazil? The latest.

• 13:35Chris Williamson?

  Latest, if you were to, I'm, I'm gonna organize a dinner with somebody and I can pick a bunch of different nationalities. Which one's gonna arrive on average last?

• 13:45George Mack?

  I feel like they got like the Olympics, but in reverse.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  Have you ever heard of Indian standard time? I'm not even hearing this, it's actually real. Cause it's one hour later than it's actually supposed to start. So it turns out a long time ago, people would go to the movies.

• 13:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  And, you know, the movie doesn't start on time, which is absolutely hilarious. You're like, everybody just expects. And then the whole term Indian standard time came about, which is absolutely hilarious. But it's typically referred to as one hour past something is starting.

• 14:13Chris Williamson?

  After the actual time.

• 14:13Tim Ferriss?

  So I've heard Brazilians refer to Brazilian time also. Well, what is the, what is the least punctual?

• 14:19Chris Williamson?

  It's anywhere that's got good, I think you can talk about culture and people and stuff like that. But what's more interesting is to just talk about what is the lifestyle of that particular ecosystem? So if you're gonna go Spain, Italy, you know, Portugal, they're just, you've got wonderful weather, late nights throughout the summer. Everyone's smoking, having a red wine, but you've been a Palmer, Mallorca or wherever. And you see people outside sat on wrought iron chairs, having a pre dinner cigarette at 10:30 PM at night. These are old people, they're not going out, oh, this isn't the beginning of them going out to go and party and head to the club. Afterward, not going S T K for a, you know, nighttime party brunch. So I would say maybe some of the Mediterranean-y places like that.

• 15:01Chris Williamson?

  I guess, as I think further afield, I don't know much about India, but perhaps. Neither, neither do I, but it is. Genealogically.

• 15:11Tim Ferriss?

  Tim, you know a lot about Denmark. I'm like, oh, I don't know.

• 15:14George Mack?

  I wonder, this is, this is really hippie crack shit, but this is what we're here for.

• 15:19Tim Ferriss?

  Now, now we're getting.

• 15:20George Mack?

  Now we're getting that, yeah. I wonder, it's like that Saffir-Walp hypothesis of how much.

• 15:25Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, lost me.

• 15:27Chris Williamson?

  That didn't sound hippie friendly. He'll get that.

• 15:29George Mack?

  The idea is that it's the Wittgenstein quote of like the limits of my world are the limits of my language. And we think that we shape language, but language shapes us. And it feels immediately like so trivial, so esoteric to have the conversation. Every kind of dismisses language as, it's almost like neuro-linguistic programming that we shouldn't take it seriously. But how much the words that we use, so I wonder, obviously, England, Australia, America, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa. Share this English ancestry, but how much then that they have the same language keeps the culture similar as well. Versus if you fork the language, do you change?

• 16:06Chris Williamson?

  I don't know, man. If you go and meet a South African, you compare them to a Scottish person, they're quite different.

• 16:10George Mack?

  So it's true, both angry, both very angry. So there you go. And we had this at my birthday.

• 16:16Chris Williamson?

  It was in the middle of nowhere.

• 16:17George Mack?

  I didn't realize the spectrum exists when it comes to how people think as well. So we had my friend Billy and my friend Cameron. And Billy can't think visually at all, so he can only think in words.

• 16:31Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 16:31George Mack?

  Cameron can't think in words at all. She can only think visually.

• 16:36Chris Williamson?

  And you see this as a test that you can do, like imagine an apple in your mind. What level of detail can you see the apple at?

• 16:42George Mack?

  Could you pull that up, Jared? The apple visual test?

• 16:45Tim Ferriss?

  The lack of it, I think it's called Afantasia.

• 16:48Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yeah, yeah, Afantasia.

• 16:49George Mack?

  How do you guys think? Do you, can you, do you think more in words? Do you think more in visuals?

• 16:53Chris Williamson?

  Imagine an apple in your mind, what level of detail can you see the apple with?

• 16:57Speaker 03

  You know, in growing up, there was like this whole people with like very the visual memories or whatever, they would just like look at something and then effectively recite, you know,

• 17:07Chris Williamson?

  I dedicate.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  Fifty, fifty were.

• 17:09Tim Ferriss?

  I dedicate is what people think of as photographic.

• 17:11Speaker 03

  The photographic stunt.

• 17:12Chris Williamson?

  So Billy, for example, would be number five.

• 17:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 17:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he could, he would just think the word apple.

• 17:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  Fascinating.

• 17:19Chris Williamson?

  And then the Cameron could see the apple, but if you asked her to create that, to see the word, the word apple in her mind, she couldn't do it at all.

• 17:30Tim Ferriss?

  I asked her, how does she count in her head? And she said it's stairs.

• 17:34Chris Williamson?

  She literally visualizes stairs.

• 17:36Tim Ferriss?

  It's a fucking nightmare. I mean, I would, I'm about 10 out that direction.

• 17:40Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow.

• 17:41Tim Ferriss?

  Really? Hyper visual memory. Like I can remember almost every floor plan of every restaurant I've ever been in.

• 17:47Chris Williamson?

  What's the most like?

• 17:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, I mean, I'm not, I'm not trying to store that.

• 17:52Chris Williamson?

  So 1010, where we went for dinner the other evening, can you remember?

• 17:56Tim Ferriss?

  The table.

• 17:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What was on the table?

• 17:59Tim Ferriss?

  I don't remember the name of the, the number of the table, but it's like the, the server door was directed to our left. Right? We were effectively the last booth at the edge. The bar was to my right, nearest to my left here. Right? You were here, uh, sort of at my like two o'clock. So we ordered way too much edamame.

• 18:22Chris Williamson?

  No, no, no, we ordered the right amount of edamame, which is too much edamame. It's just the only amount of edamame that's.

• 18:28Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, it depends on how many gallons of oil you like on your.

• 18:30Chris Williamson?

  Ah, it's true. I think salted edamame, when you start to try and spice up edamame too much, ruins it.

• 18:37Tim Ferriss?

  But here's what I would say, just to quickly put something to this, I don't want people to feel badly if they can't go out a few standard deviations towards like the hyper, uh, like hypernesia, right? The opposite of amnesia because.

• 18:53Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, when you have, my dad has this as well, really exaggerated development of certain types of memory, it can make it really hard to let go of grievances.

• 19:03Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 19:04Tim Ferriss?

  Slights against you, the email that you sent that ended up, whatever it is, right? Like there, there, there is an advantage. There are some tremendous advantages to forgetting. And so when you, when you're not as selective, you could argue it's almost counter revolutionary past a certain point to have an overly developed memory, I would say.

• 19:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think I, I can recall, like, one of the things that I was talking to somebody about was that I have vivid, um, face recognition, like almost like, uh, like the face ID type situation. And I can remember faces that I've seen only one time 15 years ago. Problem is this becomes socially awkward oftentimes you meet somebody.

• 19:51Chris Williamson?

  There's massive asymmetry.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  Right. You're like, I, I know everything about you because we'd met once and this was 10 years ago, but you can't really bring that up.

• 20:00Chris Williamson?

  Okay, you freaked.

• 20:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like, it's, it's, it's very creepy.

• 20:02Tim Ferriss?

  You sound like a stalker.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  Exactly, but I did not research them. Similarly with quotes and visuals, I think I personally have a very, very vivid like visual element and I can probably look at something once and then 10 years later, if you quiz me, I would probably get about 90% of that correct.

• 20:19Chris Williamson?

  That's wild. Do you want to tell the story?

• 20:21Speaker 03

  But the forgetting part is crazy.

• 20:23Chris Williamson?

  Do you want to tell the story about the first elevator we ever got into together?

• 20:26Speaker 03

  Oh my God, yes. I actually, um, I think there was a new appointment of an Xbox CEO and she was like, I, I made a tweet about it. I was like, wait, she doesn't really have any experience with gaming. And, um, and then Chris and I were in an elevator and turns out she was there.

• 20:45Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you're leaving out one critical footnote. That tweet was not seen by two people.

• 20:50Speaker 03

  It was, it was.

• 20:50Chris Williamson?

  Millions, millions of people saw you call out the Xbox CEO. We get into.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  I was, I was just simply remarking about culture in the way that like people frame this because like it's a unique development.

• 21:04Chris Williamson?

  But I put my foot in it. I put my foot in it.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was hilarious.

• 21:08Chris Williamson?

  I'm trying to big up my friend who recognizes the Xbox CEO and goes, hey, you're the CEO of Xbox. There's some unassuming lady dressed real nice, had maybe a partner or security or something with her. I'm like, you identify correctly. And she sort of sheepishly is like, yeah, yeah, I am. That's me. And I think you introduced yourself.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  She was very nervous about it.

• 21:26Chris Williamson?

  A little. Yes, she was sheepish about it, which was quite charming.

• 21:29Speaker 03

  She was the actual CEO. I was like, wait, that person's usually just like so into it or whatever.

• 21:34Chris Williamson?

  And I said, well, you should, it is signal on, on X, you must, he's a fantastic writer, detective and all the rest of this stuff. There is a 100% chance that she saw your tweet. And immediately as soon as I said that, the fucking atmosphere in the elevator went frosty as hell.

• 21:50Speaker 03

  It was, um, look, I, I, nothing against her personally, but.

• 21:54Chris Williamson?

  I tried to do something nice for a friend. No, it was wonderful.

• 21:56George Mack?

  Came back to, uh, came back to buy you.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  No, and that, that has happened multiple times. I think going back to Tim's point about the forgetting part, I think about this a lot, which is

• 22:04Speaker 03

  what a great feature of, of the mind in some sense, like the forgetting part, like I think about AI memory. You know, today it's so easy to build, like, tell AI to extract some fact and try to remember it and we store it somewhere. And then you basically use it for some other thing. It's very common people are doing it.

• 22:24Speaker 03

  How do you forget? How does like an AI forget things? Like what is the underlying? Yeah. And like.

• 22:30Chris Williamson?

  Of salience.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  How do you think about the world with respect to, you know, building sort of artificial memory constraints, just like the human mind? And the forgetting part is such an essential element, like that is no longer relevant or that is not important at the moment. We, the AI systems don't really know that. And so when you pass in a bunch of these memories into context, which is what a lot of these companies do, turns out you get a lot of noise.

• 22:57Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 22:58Speaker 03

  And it tries to make these connections that your mind.

• 23:02Chris Williamson?

  There you go.

• 23:03Tim Ferriss?

  If people want a real exaggerated case of not forgetting, there's an old book called The Mind of a Neimanist, like mnemonic device, The Mind of a Neimanist by A.J. Luria, which is effectively an extended case study of someone who never forgets. And there are other ways to look at it. I think there's a doc called Brain Man about Daniel Dennett. I think I'm getting that right.

• 23:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 23:26Tim Ferriss?

  And.

• 23:27Chris Williamson?

  The atheist.

• 23:29Tim Ferriss?

  Nah, you know what? The Dennett, I might be mixing it up with the philosopher.

• 23:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 23:33Tim Ferriss?

  Who passed away, but it's something very close to that.

• 23:37Chris Williamson?

  I thought.

• 23:37Tim Ferriss?

  People can look up Brain Man, British.

• 23:39Chris Williamson?

  I talked, I talked George yesterday about savant syndrome. Know what this is? So there was a famous case of a guy called Thomas McHugh, a British guy. So in his early years, he was in a youth prison, was a bit of a disruptor, kind of a hooligan type guy. And he's in his 50s, early 50s, and on the bathroom, he shits himself so aggressively that he causes an aneurysm, like a blood explosion in his brain. And then as he's on the floor, he's terrified that someone's going to find him with his pants around his ankles. So he tries to pull his pants up and causes another one to go off, completely like pops both sides of his brain, wakes up in the hospital a few

• 24:20Chris Williamson?

  days later and turns into a obsessive painter who can only speak in rhyme and paints between three or six or nine paintings at any one time, paints for 19 hours a day and couldn't bear to think about suffering. So it sort of swept the, the steps in front of him as he was like some Buddhist guy, just had a total come to art moment. But yeah, shat himself so aggressively that he had acquired savant syndrome.

• 24:47Speaker 03

  I think if you're a great athlete, for example, you gotta, you gotta learn how to forget. You guys know about yips, like in baseball and other places? So it turns out, you know, it's something.

• 24:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  It's like typically, you know, you make an error or you do something egregiously wrong in sports, everybody's watching.

• 25:05Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 25:06Speaker 03

  And then you're sort of had this phantom reaction or whatever. And then that continuously happens. And yips is, is, is like somebody throwing that ball. And, you know, there's some famous players that have dealt with this problem. And turns out.

• 25:21Speaker 03

  You know, you gotta forget.

• 25:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 25:23Speaker 03

  You gotta forget.

• 25:24Tim Ferriss?

  It's like a conditioned hesitancy or flinch.

• 25:26Chris Williamson?

  Flinch getting in your own.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  Involuntary potential reaction, but I'm not quite sure how how it relates to, you know, the the memory aspect of it, but ultimately, when you're when you're a great athlete, you watch a game tape afterwards, you're like, OK, I I process it and then you have to discard that. You learn from it and you move on. Did you guys see the Marc Andreessen stuff about?

• 25:49Chris Williamson?

  Retard maxing.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  Retard maxing.

• 25:50Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  That, I think, component wise.

• 25:53Chris Williamson?

  I asked, I asked, I asked Huberman.

• 25:56Speaker 03

  How many times that word goes.

• 25:57Chris Williamson?

  Huberman, if he's personally threatened by the retard maxing movement.

• 26:01Speaker 03

  What did he say?

• 26:02Chris Williamson?

  I think he is. I think he partially is. His entire career has been built on anti retard maxing.

• 26:07Speaker 03

  And there's a lot of these people who have like, you know, they they they have a set of context. I don't know why I refer to everything like this, but and then they they sort of keep it around, but it's super valuable to discard some of that stuff because ultimately, none of that really matters. I think Sam Harris, all this stuff.

• 26:25Chris Williamson?

  No, go, go, go.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  No, I think it was it was just really interesting. The present matters the most. People tend to focus on the future a lot more. Anxiety, the worries or whatever, and then they marry that with the past. And I think this is this is one of the things I personally am like, how do I live in the moment, think about what matters and focus on a few things?

• 26:47Chris Williamson?

  Whilst learning from my experience.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  Exactly, but you learn from it, but you don't dwell on it. You don't ruminate on it. You don't. I think people, I had to, I had to move neighborhoods from a breakup because every time I walked around, I can, I could vividly feel the moments that occurred in that place. From a coffee shop to, I don't know, like, a flower shop.

• 27:13Chris Williamson?

  A dog, a dog, a dog that you regularly see with its walker.

• 27:15Speaker 03

  In a restaurant, I'm like, I sat there. You know, this person was next to me. I knew exactly what we talked about. I knew exactly how that moment ended. And I could replay that every single time I took another step.

• 27:29Chris Williamson?

  Dude, one of the best stories I've heard about this is from Alain de Botton. And he's describing being in Paris and it's a early summer day. Beautiful weather outside, a little cloudy, a little bit of sun. And it's sort of late afternoon, classic European fashion. This French couple are sat around a small table, wrought iron chairs. And they've got a couple of espressos and they're just so deeply in love. Young couple, sort of maybe mid twenties, something like that. He's got this line, he says, "I looked at them and realized that this beautiful memory would be one of the greatest sources of pain to one of these people if the relationship ever ended." And it's strange that this thing that at the time is really, really wonderful.

• 28:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 28:09Chris Williamson?

  Actually becomes the thing that's kind of the, "I'm never going to Paris again. I'm fucking moving to Rome," or whatever it is, "because I need to totally change my context." And that's also the same when it comes to phones, right? I tried to stop using my phone and this still kind of works. I just changed the pocket that I put it in. Because I realized that for an entire decade, I'd had my phone in my right pocket. And like a speed shooter withdrawing his firearm, I would just put, mindlessly put my hand in my pocket. The number of times that I pulled my wallet out when I changed it to look at my wallet. It's just habitual, it's just this obsessive sort of routine.

• 28:45Speaker 03

  You guys know about this phantom vibrations? So it turns out people have their phone on their pocket, right? And I went to a meditation retreat. And, um, no phones, just meditation. And I felt vibrations. I didn't even have my phone in my pocket.

• 29:03Chris Williamson?

  Do you have a vibrator?

• 29:06Speaker 03

  Two of them.

• 29:07Chris Williamson?

  There we go.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  That might have been my dildo.

• 29:09George Mack?

  But no likes these.

• 29:10Chris Williamson?

  We don't call that a meditation retreat where I'm from.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  Fair enough. What is body blue color? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

• 29:16Chris Williamson?

  Tuesday.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  It was really interesting. And it turns out, I Googled it, turns out that's actually a real thing. People feel phantom vibrations from their phone. You can go check it out. And I was like, wow, your body is so tuned to this over, every time you get a notification, every time you get whatever. And most people have their phone on silent now. So the vibration is really like a thing with the haptics.

• 29:37Chris Williamson?

  Pavlovianly programmed yourself.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  Pretty much.

• 29:40Chris Williamson?

  To expect this thing to happen.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  So like, this, this sort of device is now a potential part of your, the way that you sort of feel and understand the world. And in this case, kind of like a, a touch type sense. But it was remarkable. And I, I went down the rabbit hole and I looked at it and I was like, wow, this is not just me.

• 29:58Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 29:58Speaker 03

  There's so many individuals. It, like you said, if you, if I move my phone in my pocket, the other pocket, the other one will completely vibrate.

• 30:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, my wallet's gonna be vibrating.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, for some people, that might be a feature.

• 30:10Chris Williamson?

  Again, true.

• 30:10Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 30:11Chris Williamson?

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• 30:56Chris Williamson?

  function and muscle strength in older adults. It's not about pushing harder, it's about actually supporting the cellular machinery underneath your training. If you care about staying strong into your 30s, 40s, and 50s and beyond, this is foundational. Best of all, there is a 30 day money back guarantee plus free shipping in the US and they ship internationally. And right now, you can get up to 20% off by going to the link in the description below or heading to timeline.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's timeline.com slash modern wisdom.

• 31:26Chris Williamson?

  And modern wisdom, a check out.

• 31:28George Mack?

  To play devil's advocate on the whole,

• 31:33George Mack?

  the ability to remember everything being a bad idea. I think a lot of these conversations, rather than a light switch, it's more dimmer and different people, different occasions, it will be good and bad for. Because a lot of people look at us being able to remember everything now, very similar to when writing came along. So before writing, we couldn't store any information down. So that completely changed us. But I always think of, so do you guys know, I've forgotten the name of Grenfell Tower in the UK. Have you heard about what Grenfell Tower is? So it's, it's kind of, it's one of the biggest tragedies that's ever happened in the UK, where a council estate, which will be the equivalent of your projects, was poorly designed, set on fire.

• 32:17Chris Williamson?

  Can you get a photo of it up?

• 32:18George Mack?

  Loads of people.

• 32:18Chris Williamson?

  Jared Grenfell Tower.

• 32:19George Mack?

  Loads of people burned alive in it. And it was a huge like government inquiry, how are we going to fix it? What we're going to change about it? And what was the crazy thing about the day was that as this building was on fire, kind of like nine 11, a baby was picked up on the news, was dropped from the top floor.

• 32:36Chris Williamson?

  Look at that.

• 32:37George Mack?

  So a baby was picked up from the top floor and dropped and somebody caught it. And it was this kind of miracle in this like horrific day that happened. And it got reported everywhere. There was about five different eyewitnesses. And about six months later, after the emotion of the event settled down, a few physicists started looking at it and going, well, hold on. That baby had hundreds of feet in the air. If we just ran the maths here, it would just disintegrate on the catch. And as soon as they started to inquire like the eyewitness testimony, it was a completely hallucinated memory. So on the one hand, will the ability to store memories will mean that we can't let go of certain things. But it may also mean that we let go of complete fictions that we're telling ourselves that never happened.

• 33:22Chris Williamson?

  Or that we would invent them as well, right? Because if you're Tim, your recollection of the flames is, you know, in 4K.

• 33:30George Mack?

  Yes.

• 33:30Chris Williamson?

  But the mirage of a baby being thrown out. You know, the terminal velocity of a cat is non-fatal.

• 33:36George Mack?

  What do you mean?

• 33:38Chris Williamson?

  I can't say it any other way.

• 33:42Chris Williamson?

  There's only one. If I drop a cat from any distance. Yes. It's the speed that it reaches when it hits the ground. Is exactly. On average is non-fatal. So it doesn't die.

• 33:54Tim Ferriss?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna.

• 33:55Chris Williamson?

  Surely not.

• 33:55Tim Ferriss?

  I'm gonna just raise an eyebrow.

• 33:57Chris Williamson?

  Ask ChatGPT. A cat's terminal velocity depends on its size, body position. Yeah, whatever. Estimated terminal velocity is about 60 miles an hour. Some studies and veterinary analysis place it between. Okay, so see, look, see, depends on posture. So if you've got a cat.

• 34:09Tim Ferriss?

  Around five to seven stories. Yeah, okay.

• 34:12Chris Williamson?

  Injuries.

• 34:12Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, that's higher up than I would expect.

• 34:13Chris Williamson?

  Some cats survive because they reach terminal velocity, stop accelerating, relax, and then orient themselves for impact. And look, I'm not, look, it's, it's trying to caveat, like, basically, am I okay to throw a cat out of a window? That's what ChatGPT thinks I'm doing.

• 34:27Tim Ferriss?

  Now, this is one of those cases when somebody's like, you know, when people die, they release DMT from their brains. And I'm like, how would you know that, though? Like, who, which family is consented to have some science be like, I know this is a hard moment, but let me like, tap your grandma's brain. And this is like.

• 34:44Chris Williamson?

  Your terminal velocity of a cat is non-fatal.

• 34:46Tim Ferriss?

  Injuries often increase up to around five to seven stories. Like, I just want to know.

• 34:50Chris Williamson?

  Beyond seven stories?

• 34:51Tim Ferriss?

  Where in, like, Sierra Leone, they're like, okay, let's take these 40 cats and drop them.

• 34:56Chris Williamson?

  Just put it into one of those T-shirts.

• 34:57Tim Ferriss?

  Five, 10, 15 stories.

• 34:59Chris Williamson?

  T-shirt fires that they, yeah, yeah, T-shirt cannon that they've got.

• 35:01Speaker 03

  What's the highest for cats?

• 35:04Tim Ferriss?

  Speaking of hallucinating, I just want to fact check myself. Daniel Tammett, T A M M E T.

• 35:09Chris Williamson?

  Paralyzly close. All right, what do you, what do you bring to the table?

• 35:11Speaker 03

  Hallucinating is really fascinating subject. So people talk about AI hallucinations.

• 35:14Tim Ferriss?

  Now, now we're in my.

• 35:15Chris Williamson?

  Oh, sorry, sorry, hold on. This is, I'm, we're still going. The highest reliably documented fall survived by a cat is generally believed to be 32 stories. Sabrina in New York City, 1987, she fell from the 32nd floor of a skyscraper, survived with a chipped tooth, collapsed lung, and minor chest injuries. After treatment, she reportedly recovered fully. Dude. Telling you, terminal velocity of a cat, non-fatal.

• 35:36Speaker 03

  They're able to slow themselves down, right? Effectively? Like a parachute-ish. I mean, they're not flying squirrels. Wow. This is remarkable.

• 35:49Chris Williamson?

  What did I get you with the other day? It was when we were talking about the fact that if a man doesn't have a girlfriend, the way that he behaves between 7pm and 11pm at night can only be destructive. And I told a friend about this and-

• 36:02Speaker 03

  Unless there's the internet.

• 36:03Chris Williamson?

  Well, even with the internet, it's still destructive, right? Because you're just embedding bad habits and doom scrolling and it's all bullshit.

• 36:08Speaker 03

  Self-destructive, I suppose.

• 36:10Chris Williamson?

  However-

• 36:10Speaker 03

  Less on, maybe.

• 36:11Chris Williamson?

  I asked a friend about this and he said, yeah, so my buddy was single and I'm in a relationship. And apparently at like 8:30pm at night, he would just receive photos of his friend headstanding. Just like selfies of him doing headstands.

• 36:27Tim Ferriss?

  What could go wrong?

• 36:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, all right, Nirav, what have you brought? Come on, give me some.

• 36:31Speaker 03

  Um, I think the hallucination thing is really fascinating. People have this debate on AI hallucinations and there's a bunch of these topics that are written in. On the edge, Kirk Poffey has written a bunch of this stuff. And it turns out, you know, humans hallucinate as well. Almost all the features of AI today that exist. They exist in humans in some way, shape or form. And people are often really baffled by it, right? They hate the hallucinations. I think of them as more of like just a replication of the human mind and how it works. And it turns out people hallucinate memories all the time. People manipulate memories. In fact, if you look at things in the past, you're effectively removing, you remember often fond memories or really painful stuff. The middle kind of fades away oftentimes.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  I'm curious to get your thoughts on this, Tim, about like, I think about this a lot because for our product, we have to like make sure these things are low and context is there.

• 37:26Chris Williamson?

  Do you want to explain what you do?

• 37:27Speaker 03

  We're building kind of, you know, today, the iPhone is kind of a- When you look at it and we go for glance, people always tap on apps and then you have to go and pull whatever you need to know. We're kind of building a layer on, on devices that is kind of glanceable information directly on your home screen. That's entirely processed by AI. What you might want to know right now, or things might be important to you. And the idea of intelligence today, as it exists, it's much more, I'm going to go ask it a question, create this giant prompt, do all this stuff. And, you know, basically you have to do the heavy lifting where we try to do the heavy lifting for you by making

• 38:09Speaker 03

  that presentation layer directly on your home screen that sort of understands what's happening already in the background and surfaces it when you need to know it. So it's kind of an agentic home screen for your iPhone. Turns out the iPhone home screen hasn't changed in 20 years. You're roughly using the same device, the same thing.

• 38:25Chris Williamson?

  Widgets, I guess.

• 38:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they're underutilized. I think we use them in a creative way.

• 38:30Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 38:31Speaker 03

  And so, and so, like, you know, we're not going to go, we're like, two people, three people. So we can't really build a device. We can't really invest hardcore. So we have to operate in the application layer and utilize all the things that are affordances that the OS exposes to us as developers. So creatively, we, we sort of build this experience and we're a few weeks old. Pretty awesome. But it's been so much fun to be able to think about the way that ambient AI will really work. Imagine you go into a room. There's a screen. Has presence detection, knows who you are, what you might want to see or know or do if you wake up in the morning. These

• 39:12Speaker 03

  are the things that will kind of light up over time. And so like this stuff might be in your life persistently, if you want to, with your permission.

• 39:21Chris Williamson?

  Have you thought about what to call it? It feels like sort of context dependent.

• 39:25George Mack?

  Ambient AI is good.

• 39:26Chris Williamson?

  Ambient AI is lovely.

• 39:28George Mack?

  Jordi as well, AI.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  Ambient AI.

• 39:30George Mack?

  AI.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  AI. We need to, but I think, I don't know if the terminology is there, you know, it turns out all the terminology that exists in the past, right? You know, the hashtags of Twitter and whatnot are invented by their users. And people were like, oh, we should call it that.

• 39:43Chris Williamson?

  Bottom up, not top down.

• 39:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 39:44Chris Williamson?

  We're still waiting for a fucking name for this series on the podcast.

• 39:47George Mack?

  Do you think the future user interfaces are the glasses that everybody predicts? Cause my, I was thinking the other day as somebody who has zero experience in designing hardware or products, that the, I think the future is probably the AirPod case where you put the AirPods in. And I heard, I saw a tweet the other day that Apple have just patented cameras at the edge of the AirPods. So it could feasibly pick up the visual information here. And then with this little box that you have, it could be, you could be speaking to this device. You could even have like a little.

• 40:17Chris Williamson?

  That would be a signal receiver, right?

• 40:18George Mack?

  Yeah. So we're not always on these screens. We just had the little AirPod case ears in and then the box here.

• 40:23Chris Williamson?

  One of the problems you have with the hardware is that you need some processing power that's outside of it. That was the hardcore, um, I mean, you had an Apple Vision Pro before you sent it back.

• 40:32George Mack?

  Yes.

• 40:33Chris Williamson?

  And you need, if you're going to have something on your face or something that are wearable, you need to think about ergonomics and weight. And that means you need to send the processing off to a different, a different location. I don't know. I mean, you're right that VR is really not delivered. I think, I mean, there's always, it's good, the next thing we're going to wait for the more, we comfortable the slim line down, whatever.

• 40:56Tim Ferriss?

  There.

• 40:57Chris Williamson?

  You think?

• 40:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 40:58Chris Williamson?

  How long?

• 41:00Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, until what? What would be a good, like, not quite Turing test.

• 41:04Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So like, um, the, the sort of level of penetration that we've seen with.

• 41:08Tim Ferriss?

  Now we're talking.

• 41:10Chris Williamson?

  With AI or with like, pick any, any sort of normal device, but AI, AI would be good.

• 41:16Tim Ferriss?

  Podcast.

• 41:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Depth of penetration.

• 41:19George Mack?

  New series.

• 41:19Chris Williamson?

  Very shallow, very shallow. Wired though. Like that, I don't know, like a half a billion or a billion users of either one product or a category of products that has something to do with.

• 41:32Tim Ferriss?

  That, that type of mass adoption is, is a high bar, but I would say getting to the point where people actually enjoy, let's just call it.

• 41:44Tim Ferriss?

  Thousands of people spending hours a day using some type of lightweight VR AI, strongly AI native system. Three years, maybe less.

• 41:57Chris Williamson?

  I've seen some shit that's made by Meta that blew my fucking mind to their next, after the next

• 42:05Chris Williamson?

  set of glasses. And that was like absolutely wild to be able to see that. It's still, they're still clunky and dorky, right? But they'll, over the time that they're building this out to get it down to the form factor that you need. But I mean, these things, whatever, those things are like, they're really good. The best thing about those, not an ad, best thing about those is the fact that you can take a photo or a video without using your phone. You know, there's that famous video, was it the Chantalise on New Year's Eve, maybe 2023? And I swear, it's just this street of people. And all you can see, the entire thing is just phone screens from behind, right? Looking at the thing you're supposed to be looking at. And it is just phone screens.

• 42:46George Mack?

  Well, I would, you heard about me at the Louvre? Have I told you this story? So I had these on at the Louvre in Paris, being a sophisticated individual that I am. So I had these on and everybody was

• 42:58Tim Ferriss?

  Just looking at people's feet under the, under the bathroom stalls.

• 43:01Chris Williamson?

  George collects, George collects feet. So that's a

• 43:05George Mack?

  You can, you can, you can buy them.

• 43:07Speaker 03

  It's no, it's no longer permit, you can't really have eye contact with people in the Western culture because it's like a whatever. So people are always looking down on their feet.

• 43:15Chris Williamson?

  And that's why, that's where George comes in. Here it is.

• 43:17George Mack?

  So I had this experience at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. So everybody was there with their phones, taking a photo, but I had these glasses on. But the problem is because the Mona Lisa is so small and I'm so far back. My girlfriend now has a photo of me. So there's loads of people taking a photo of the Mona Lisa and then there's me with my glasses in the air.

• 43:35Chris Williamson?

  I'll get the photo out of it. It's horrific. It's horrific. It is nice, though, to be able to record something without taking yourself out of the moment. And I think just that. Yes. You know, the, oh, I don't like the battery life, or this thing, or they're still a little bit clunky. Or I don't usually wear glasses or whatever. Like, I get it, I get it, I get it. But the opportunity to be able to just take a photo or a video without having to feel like, oh, I'm back on this screen that I hate. I'm back in this digital environment that kind of just compresses my memory down into one time of me being on this screen. Most people don't realise how much being dehydrated impacts their performance, which is why for the last five years, I've started pretty much every morning with Element. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't.

• 44:19Chris Williamson?

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• 45:01Tim Ferriss?

  Do you think you would feel better or worse after six months of not being able to take photos or video of anything?

• 45:10Tim Ferriss?

  Other than like, okay, you need to take a photo.

• 45:12Chris Williamson?

  It's gonna be very difficult to do this podcast.

• 45:14Tim Ferriss?

  Or a scan for like business purposes, fine.

• 45:18Chris Williamson?

  For me, taking photos doesn't get in the way of my life anywhere near as much as just the ambient pinging and navigating of the digital device itself.

• 45:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 45:29Chris Williamson?

  The photos, I'm in and out. I have seen some marathon photo sessions being taken at sunset. I went to somewhere on Long Island. I can't quite remember where.

• 45:44Chris Williamson?

  There was a beautiful sunset happening over a lake and 15, 16, 17 year old skull group. It was like, it was a endurance sport of photo taking. I'm okay, that's something else. Like, that's kind of almost pathological. But for me, it's, I don't know. What about you? Do you think it would make a marked difference to your life if you couldn't take photos or videos for six months?

• 46:06Tim Ferriss?

  I think it's useful thought exercise. I would suspect it'd be better. I mean, I have not had any.

• 46:12Chris Williamson?

  Says the man with the photographic memory.

• 46:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:16Speaker 03

  Damn.

• 46:16Tim Ferriss?

  I can train people to have better visual memory.

• 46:19Chris Williamson?

  Okay, can we do it?

• 46:21Tim Ferriss?

  What was that?

• 46:21Chris Williamson?

  Can you?

• 46:22Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it's not like a, you know.

• 46:24Chris Williamson?

  Now you know Kung Fu.

• 46:25Tim Ferriss?

  It's not like an Oz Perelman, like 60 second bang, you know? It's not one of those.

• 46:29Chris Williamson?

  But what's the, like, what's the pareto, like, basics to get better at a visual memory?

• 46:34Tim Ferriss?

  Start producing. So I would have people to get a book like Drawing with the Right Side of the Brain, which is a bit of a misnomer in the way that it lateralizes things, you know, hemispherically. But if you practice, for instance, this is one tool in the toolkit, right? Practice drawing. And for instance, right, if I had a flower in a vase on this table, which would be not the most compelling way to get someone to draw, but we're all passionate drawing. What you would notice with most people is that they look at the flower, they go down to draw it, and they start drawing their mental concept of a flower. They're not actually referring to the thing in front of them. And then there are different tricks you could use.

• 47:18Tim Ferriss?

  For instance, if even right now, as we sit in Austin, Texas, bright outside, could have you look at a tree or a bush around here, sit down, I'd be like, okay, draw that, but I want you to only start with the black parts. And you'd be like, but it's a bright day, it's a green thing. I'm like, look again. And you'd be like, oh shit, there are actually black parts. Okay, we'll start with that. And as you start to do that, or depending on where you are, it's like. When most people walk through, say, in Austin, it's easy because it's like cedar tree, juniper ash, oak, like that's it. I mean, I'm being a little facetious, but there's not as much tree diversity as in other places. But if all you see is quote unquote, trees,

• 48:02Tim Ferriss?

  it's like, okay, well, let me just teach you. It's also subject dependent, right? Like the six most common trees in upstate New York, Austin, wherever it might be. And all of a sudden, instead of just seeing trees, you start to differentiate, right? So all of those, it's partially visual acuity dependent. It's partially attentionally dependent so that you're referencing something as opposed to referring to your concept of tree, table, person, whatever it might be. And then there's kind of a label dependency, right? How fine tuned or fine sliced is your ability within a given domain, right? So if you were doing like live gesture drawing,

• 48:44Tim Ferriss?

  which I think is a great way to practice drawing, and there are a number of places around Austin, and a lot of places where you can do live gesture drawing, you'd have, you know, a model in the front of the room. It's not always going to be a hot naked chick. I hate to break it to you guys. Sometimes it's going to be like obese naked dude. But that's fine. And they would start with, say, five minute poses, or they might start with like one minute poses. Typically, they'd start with like very short poses. So you can't overanalyze or intellectualize what you are doing. You have to keep your hand moving. And then they would go to longer and longer held poses. And you'd be shocked how much your visual memory improves if you do that and you are not constantly self

• 49:26Tim Ferriss?

  interrupting. So for me, I mean, I don't have any social media on this phone. I haven't for a couple of years. I do not think I've sacrificed one iota of quote unquote, being informed at all. I don't have vibrate on, I do not have ring on, which can produce some funny like death spirals of people trying to like call one another, but neither person has the phone ringing. But I also think, you know, there's, there's some data to suggest that if people have fewer mirrors in their homes, they are generally self-report as being happier. This is a mirror, right? This is the black mirror. So I just, I feel like the less you look at this thing, haven't run a study on this, but I would bet a healthy chunk of change.

• 50:09Tim Ferriss?

  I just think the less you interact with this, the better, especially given how prevalent fake feeds are. It's just like the machine is an illusion, most of it.

• 50:17Speaker 03

  Did you guys see that quote where, um, I think this philosopher, I forgot the name, but it was like, man was never meant to have a mirror.

• 50:23Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 50:25Speaker 03

  Self-reflection like that is detrimental in some ways.

• 50:29Chris Williamson?

  We wouldn't have known what we looked like until, Jared, can you find out when mirrors were invented?

• 50:36Tim Ferriss?

  Well, when was the first?

• 50:36George Mack?

  You would know with water.

• 50:37Tim Ferriss?

  You would know with water.

• 50:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, you would go to the pond, for example, and look at your.

• 50:40Tim Ferriss?

  Like Achilles.

• 50:41Speaker 03

  Face. Their, their nature.

• 50:43Tim Ferriss?

  Or narcissist.

• 50:44Speaker 03

  This is why, like, if you look at animals, they're, for a variety of reasons, obviously, with intelligence, whatever, but they're often very baffled by their.

• 50:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 50:52Speaker 03

  Presence in the mirror. And now we're looking at ourselves more often than ever before. The selfie cameras effectively changed the, the dynamics of everything.

• 51:01Chris Williamson?

  During COVID, there was something called Zoom Face. There was a marked increase in people getting cosmetic surgery because they were seeing themselves more.

• 51:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:08Chris Williamson?

  Because they were spending so many.

• 51:09Speaker 03

  Now there's, there's AI filters on Google Meet and Zoom.

• 51:13Chris Williamson?

  I want my skin smoothing for my interview.

• 51:15Speaker 03

  Exactly. You would add makeup or whatever. And going back to your point about the photographic memory thing, did you guys ever play that?

• 51:21Tim Ferriss?

  Which I don't have, to be clear. No, I, I know people who can do this and then 10 minutes later, read it back to you.

• 51:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 51:30Tim Ferriss?

  From memory. That is photographic memory. I don't have that.

• 51:34Speaker 03

  You know that game you used to play as a kid when somebody would draw on your back and you'd have to figure out what that drew?

• 51:39Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  It was actually a really interesting skill building game because then you would have to effectively imagine different senses coming together. So you feel what somebody's drawing, whether it's a flower or a mountain or a sun or whatever.

• 51:52Chris Williamson?

  Always a penis.

• 51:53Speaker 03

  And if you're, exactly.

• 51:55Chris Williamson?

  First.

• 51:55Tim Ferriss?

  Also a good podcast name.

• 51:57Chris Williamson?

  Always a penis?

• 52:01Speaker 03

  That game was remarkable.

• 52:03Tim Ferriss?

  All roads lead to penis, maybe.

• 52:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 52:05Tim Ferriss?

  I know you like the Roman Empire.

• 52:06Chris Williamson?

  downfall of penis.

• 52:07George Mack?

  What's, um, I was just double checking then, cause about the history of the mirror.

• 52:11Tim Ferriss?

  Can I say how much I live how you say double? I can't even fucking say it.

• 52:14George Mack?

  Double.

• 52:15Tim Ferriss?

  That's. God, it adds like at least seven.

• 52:18George Mack?

  I'm from, I'm from Rochdale originally, Tim, and whenever you're in the UK, it's a big tourist scene. You'd love it. I'll take you there. You'd love it. You'd love it.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  What is that?

• 52:27Chris Williamson?

  The mirror.

• 52:28George Mack?

  So the mirror, um, that. We had the creation of the mirror, but I, as part of AI coming bigger and bigger, I've been going down like old revolutions, so the industrial revolution and the Gutenberg printing press revolution. So Gutenberg, when he was creating the printing press, he was originally trying to create, I think, a mirror machine and accidentally or ended up morphing into what became the printing press.

• 52:52Tim Ferriss?

  Wait, what the hell is a mirror machine?

• 52:53Chris Williamson?

  So he makes mirrors.

• 52:54George Mack?

  Yeah, so there you go. So around

• 52:58Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know how you get from that to the printing.

• 52:59George Mack?

  Fourteen thirty eight to fourteen

• 53:01Tim Ferriss?

  You grind sand to make mirrors.

• 53:03George Mack?

  Thirty nine Gutenberg was in Strasbourg, running a partnership to mass produce pilgrim mirrors, small polished metal badges that pilgrims pin to their hats to catch holy rays radiating from relics, then carried home to benefit relatives.

• 53:15Tim Ferriss?

  I like that idea.

• 53:18Chris Williamson?

  It's like a capacitor for religious goodwill.

• 53:21George Mack?

  So his capital was running out to appease investors. Gutenberg said he would share a secret with them, art and adventure, research that was the basis for his yet to be built printing press.

• 53:30Tim Ferriss?

  That's cool.

• 53:31Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Nice. All right, Tim, you must have some heaters. What have you brought from home? Show me something.

• 53:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I've got something. This is an article. I've got a bunch of stuff, but I'm going to take kind of a slight left turn. It's related to a lot of the stuff we're talking about, but this caught my attention. It's an article called Riding the Leopard by Packy McCormick. And it was, it was, it was sent to me. I had never read anything of his. And this was sent to me a few days ago by

• 54:06Tim Ferriss?

  someone adjacent to one of the top AI technologists out there, which is part of what makes it interesting. So I'll just, I'll, I'll read a couple of sections here and then I want to get your sense and thoughts on things. So what a week to get to talk to a room of technology people. This is a transcribed talk that Packy gave. Sierra just raised at 15 billion. Anthropic crossed a 44 billion run rate and launched a new company with some huge funds that have 1.5 billion to deploy blah, blah, blah, blah. OpenAI did the same thing, but with 4 billion, blah, blah, blah, blah, this billion, that billion, all of which raises an important question. Who gives a shit? I mean that. Why do we care? And then it goes down and he says, last night, a woman who reads my newsletter reached out over Substack DM.

• 54:50Tim Ferriss?

  She said she'd been diagnosed with stage four cancer. She's now in remission. She'd been confronted with the question we've all been facing. What happens to human purpose when AI removes scarcity? Or in her case, the need to be productive? To answer it, this is the interesting part, right? She analyzed more than 200 sci fi books. Across all of these books, by far the most common thing left to solve for post scarcity is meaning. 59% of books were about the search for meaning. Identity was next at 17%. And then it goes on. And, you know, there are questions. If new technology is so great, why are so many people unhappy? Right? If we have means our ancestors couldn't have dreamed of, why is there a meaning crisis?

• 55:33Tim Ferriss?

  And then it quotes Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, who wrote, "The truth is that as the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged, survival for what? Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for." And ultimately, in the piece, he ends up talking about, he really goes out there. Well, I would bet that Dear Packy has done a fair amount of drugs, but, and that's meant as a compliment, Packy, if you hear this. But we get into nonduality. We get into differentiation as moral obligation. But I want to explain the, the origin of the name of the piece, Riding the Leopard. And it's from Joseph Campbell. And effectively, he's talking about the hero's journey. And I'll read two parts and then I'll stop.

• 56:17Tim Ferriss?

  But the goal of the hero trip down to the jewel point is to find those levels in the psyche that open, open, open, and finally open to the mystery of yourself being Buddha consciousness or the Christ. That's the journey. It's all about finding that still point in your mind where commitment drops away. The separateness apparent in the world is secondary. Beyond that world of opposites is an unseen but experienced unity and identity in us all. All right. Then this is the- These sort of wellspring of the name of the piece. You must return with the bliss and integrate it. The return is seeing the radiance everywhere. All right. The goal is to live with godlike composure on the full rush of energy like Dionysus riding the leopard without being torn to pieces. And it goes on. It's worth reading.

• 56:59Tim Ferriss?

  It does get a little squirrely later on, but what I'm curious about is how you guys think about, if you do, solving for meaning. Because I tend to skew, I wouldn't say dystopian, but a hyper vigilant and have a lot of concern for the next five, 10 years. Not just with AI, but with the reaction to AI. All right. So it's, it's one thing if, if AI quote unquote, takes jobs. But if everyone fears it is going to take jobs, there's a, there are consequences of that in of itself. Right. But I'm wondering how you guys think about or solve for meaning.

• 57:41Tim Ferriss?

  And I'll just add one more thing, which is, actually, no, I'll save it. I'll park that for, for, for maybe injecting a little later. But how do you guys think about it?

• 57:52Speaker 03

  You know, one thing that comes to mind, this is the weirdest thing, by the way, which is, I like aviation. And there's, this is all going to connect, which is, you know, turns out airplanes crash only because there's multiple systems that go wrong, whatever. And, and the reason why that came to mind, Tim, was that a captain has a decision to make when something bad happens. How much do you communicate what happened to the passengers? Like, what do you say? Do you, do you like, hey, you know, we've lost hydraulics, we've lost stuff, you know, multiple systems are wrong, whatever. Completely transparent, you freak people out.

• 58:29Speaker 03

  If you're not share enough information, people are like, oh, what's going on? Why is it turbulent?

• 58:34Speaker 03

  How does that marry to AI? The people who are building these systems, how much do they communicate what they think are things that might change about the future, things that might have a turbulent nature to them? And that is a delicate art, which is, you know, you see Dario going on pods and saying stuff like. Software engineering solved, you know, software will be free. Once that happens, you know, you get these ripple effects, whatnot. All this stuff happens. And there's other people who are like much more optimistic about the world, which is like, hey, you know what? Every and every revolution has created jobs. Certainly it has eliminated them, but we've progressed. And so it's really fascinating.

• 59:18Speaker 03

  I think this is an interesting environment where people are like, how much do you? Even as a lot of researchers in San Francisco, for example, really believe that we've solved almost every problem, roughly, that, that, that the dominoes will fall very quickly from here on out. If you have AI self correcting, self researching, you get the AGI, what happens?

• 59:43Tim Ferriss?

  How do you solve personally? How do you think about meaning? If you do, this is not a, this is not like a prejudgment either. I'm not like, what? You don't think about meaning?

• 59:52Speaker 03

  You know?

• 59:52Tim Ferriss?

  You crass capitalist.

• 59:53Speaker 03

  I tend not to, I'm not a planner. Too much, you know, I, I think planning is, is good in some sense, but also kind of detrimental. It occupies bandwidth that would otherwise be more useful for now. I think people tend to live in the future a little bit more than they tend, they, they should.

• 1:00:10Tim Ferriss?

  Are you religious?

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  What was that?

• 1:00:11Tim Ferriss?

  Are any of you religious? No, no.

• 1:00:15Speaker 03

  I'd say I'm spiritual, but not necessarily, you know, organized religion or whatnot.

• 1:00:20Chris Williamson?

  Welcome to Austin.

• 1:00:21Speaker 03

  What was that?

• 1:00:21Chris Williamson?

  Welcome to Austin.

• 1:00:23Speaker 03

  You know, I think.

• 1:00:23Chris Williamson?

  We all do a bit of Scientology every now and again, right? Do a bit of Scientology. You make it sound like weed.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, come on, come on, come on.

• 1:00:31Chris Williamson?

  We do a bit of Scientology.

• 1:00:33Speaker 03

  Did you guys see what Brian Johnson posted yesterday? He was like, prayer, he's talking about prayer. He's like, I've been trying to pray more and I don't know what prayer means and, or I don't know what prayer is.

• 1:00:41Chris Williamson?

  If Brian goes full circle and ends up being a Mormon again, that is going to be.

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  There was a quote tweet exactly like this. He's like, turns out the answer to everything is just Jesus Christ.

• 1:00:50Chris Williamson?

  Honestly, dude.

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  Or longevity or whatever.

• 1:00:52Tim Ferriss?

  There was a funny comment. I mean, I think Brian, that's an interesting one coming from Brian. I would actually love to talk to him about that more than a lot of the biohacking, given his history.

• 1:01:01Chris Williamson?

  Brian's a sweetie.

• 1:01:02Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, there was a, I like Brian. There was a, there was a comment that they said, wait, let me get this straight. Brian left Mormonism, now he's telling us we can't drink alcohol, we can't drink.

• 1:01:15Tim Ferriss?

  I thought that was pretty good. But okay, so what is, what is this? And again, I don't want to be labor this, but I actually really want to know from you guys. Yeah. How you think, if you think about it.

• 1:01:28George Mack?

  I guess there's two, there's a few different parts as I'm saying.

• 1:01:30Tim Ferriss?

  I know a lot of uber successful people who can logic and debate their way through the labyrinth of intellectuals around them, who have lots of money, who are ready to fucking jump off a cliff. Like that stuff doesn't.

• 1:01:43Chris Williamson?

  And do you think that that would be stopped if they had more meaning? You think the reason that they would jump off a cliff is because of their lack of meaning?

• 1:01:49Tim Ferriss?

  I think that that is one large contributor.

• 1:01:53Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:53Tim Ferriss?

  And there's a difference like there, yes, there's loneliness epidemic, but solving for loneliness doesn't solve for meaning.

• 1:02:00George Mack?

  So totally. This is, there's quite a lot of strands I'm gonna like unpack.

• 1:02:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:08George Mack?

  Chess is interesting one, right? That the AI can be chess, any human being at chess, but human beings still play chess. Magnus Carlsen seems to have a very enjoyable time playing chess.

• 1:02:19Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:21Tim Ferriss?

  And go on.

• 1:02:22George Mack?

  Well, there's an interesting anecdote there that we, this idea that, oh, it's going to take away everything. It's therefore, humans won't have any purpose. Yeah, it's seemingly better than everybody at chess, yet chess is still popular and people are still doing it. The, the big thing for me, I mean.

• 1:02:37Tim Ferriss?

  And the question I'm asking is not whether AI will remove meaning. It's more like, forget about, let's, we could strip AI out of completely. I'm just curious like how you guys think about it, if you do.

• 1:02:46George Mack?

  So the, I think we've discussed it when I've been in this chair before, but the idea of the precautionary principle. So the precautionary principle is human beings have a very, very, very, very good time at forecasting problems. But we have a very, very difficult time of forecasting the solutions that will come because by definition, if we had the solution, therefore there'd be no problem. But you have all these billions of human beings that end up working on this problem. My inevitable thing is, and this is where I feel it's a bit of a straw man argument. If this AI is so intelligent that it's replaced us all, and it's this super god, it'll probably figure out how to get us meaning.

• 1:03:23Chris Williamson?

  George, George, George.

• 1:03:24George Mack?

  It feels that the argument is a little bit logically.

• 1:03:26Chris Williamson?

  George believes that benevolence comes along with processing power.

• 1:03:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I wouldn't make that last statement myself. I know some people like the sort of extremes of techno optimism would say that. But you know, the point that Paki makes in his piece too, he's like.

• 1:03:40Tim Ferriss?

  Most of those arguments tend to at some point land on like, we're gonna cure cancer. It's like, well, at this point, like, he seems like there are 8.3 roughly billion people on the planet who are not gonna die of cancer, at least not in the near term. And a lot of them are miserable. So it's like, it doesn't, it might solve for certain biotech and health tech, medical problems.

• 1:04:02George Mack?

  Could it not let us understand the brain and then figure out why these people are miserable? This is what I mean around, I'm not even suggesting this is gonna be the case, there's just things that we can't even forecast.

• 1:04:11Tim Ferriss?

  I mean.

• 1:04:11Chris Williamson?

  You've done a wonderful Bernie Sanders job of two or three times now not answering the question of how do you personally think about meaning?

• 1:04:19George Mack?

  I've said Scientology, but you didn't wanna listen.

• 1:04:21Chris Williamson?

  That's not me, that's Tim. I've learned from over a thousand podcast episodes that the easier you make your health routine, the more consistent you'll be. It's like golf, right? You want to keep it simple and not mix a bunch of pills. You want the eye of the tiger, not the DUI of the tiger. That's why I'm such a huge fan of AG1. One scoop contains 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and whole food sourced ingredients in a single daily drink. And now they've taken it a step further with AG1 Next Gen, backed by four clinical trials. And in those trials, it was shown to fill common nutrient gaps, improve key nutrient levels in just three months, and increase healthy gut bacteria by 10 times, even in people who already eat well. Gone are the days of needing to buy a load of pills in the gym parking lot from some juice bro in a cyber truck.

• 1:05:05Chris Williamson?

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• 1:05:26Speaker 03

  How do you, how do you guys, um, do you guys think this is an active process in people's minds?

• 1:05:33George Mack?

  Meaning creation?

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, do people really, like, think about it in that realm? Or is it just a byproduct of existence in some sense?

• 1:05:41Tim Ferriss?

  I think it were a natural byproduct of existence. I, I, look, I would just say, maybe, maybe you see this, maybe you don't, I mean, you guys all interact on the interwebs. The degree of like apathy and nihilism and.

• 1:05:55Tim Ferriss?

  Forboding that I think is adjacent or overlapping with a creeping dread of meaninglessness in my audience over the last five years is fucking terrifying.

• 1:06:07Chris Williamson?

  And do you think that AI is contributing to that?

• 1:06:09Tim Ferriss?

  I think that technology and look, I'm not saying technology is a bad thing. Like ever since we were, our ancestors used some stick to fish out, you know, termite mound. It's like, I bet on technology. It's, you know, I've lived in the Bay Area for almost 20 years, still very actively involved with different types of technology, but I do think that there is the equivalent of digital poison. And a lot of us are drip feeding it every day. So it's not necessarily AI. I think AI, like money, power, alcohol, psychedelics is an, it's an amplifier. It's an accelerant.

• 1:06:46Chris Williamson?

  Well, certainly most people's relationship to technology now is negative. I don't know many people, perhaps except you, who have a above 80% positive interaction with technology. I was on the treadmill in the gym the other day and I was looking at, um, doing a little bit of boom scrolling on my phone and I had a screen in front of me here and then I had five screens here and then another five screens there. And then there's a video wall that's got an advert here. And I'm like, dude, I'm supposed to be in the gym and I'm trying to listen to a podcast. I'm trying to listen to a funny podcast. It's just a safe space hang. I'm not supposed to be thinking and I'm supposed to be tuned into this. And every single different screen had subtitles on, some of them had adverts on. This one's my 600 pound life.

• 1:07:31Chris Williamson?

  That one's the news from, from New York City. This one's that, and I'm like, dude, I can't, it's even, I have to actively avoid screens. Now, even if I choose to go screen free, so yeah, I think most people's relationship to, to technology is proto negative. So when they think about if this gets more, that is more of the negative and it's already removed it from me a bit. I had a really interesting conversation with Nick Bostrom. So he did his second book, which is kind of like a spiritual sequel to superintelligence. What if things go wrong? And then the next one was what if things go right? What are the problems of a solved world? And, um, he had this really interesting example where he said, basically everything that we value in other humans

• 1:08:15Chris Williamson?

  can be refined down to the fact that you need to negotiate with a world that is scarce. Why do I like motivation in someone else? Why do I like discipline? Why do I like the ability to tell the truth? Why do I like prudence? Why do I like good judgment? Because you need those things to be able to navigate through a world which is going to apply pressure to you. And if you remove that, so many of the traits that we look for in other people, they may not be, that creates a strange weightlessness with all of the different values that we've tended to prefer for all of human history, because we've been negotiating with a world that's pushed up against us. And if we move that out of the way, then what does that mean? So, yeah, I think, dude, I think the meaninglessness thing is great.

• 1:08:57Chris Williamson?

  George is infuriatingly optimistic, which means that these conversations with him are always, if AI is that smart, why won't it be benevolent enough to fix our problems? That's kind of, I guess, your- I'm not saying-

• 1:09:09Tim Ferriss?

  If there had never been, if the transformer had never made the leap to the, I guess, GPT three or four,

• 1:09:21Tim Ferriss?

  the sort of social media and digital environment in and of itself, just with more of a linear growth rate as opposed to more exponential, still would be a problem, right?

• 1:09:33Chris Williamson?

  It's just over-

• 1:09:34Tim Ferriss?

  So, we like, the AI conversation is just, it sucks up all the fucking oxygen in the room. Do you know what I mean? So, it's like, we can strip that out

• 1:09:44Tim Ferriss?

  as a thought exercise, right? I mean, I'm curious how you would answer it. If, if, and I mean, look, this is something I've been thinking about a lot because my audience, but also for me, for like my family. And I've thought a lot about these debates that Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris have had.

• 1:10:01Chris Williamson?

  First one was a fucking car crash.

• 1:10:03Tim Ferriss?

  Where, where, well, yeah, I mean, look, they've, they've had car crashes, but one of the takeaways for me was like, can-

• 1:10:13Tim Ferriss?

  Any meaningful critical mass of humans from like first principles develop a moral and value code for themselves that is secular, that is in any way gratifying, grounding, supportive in times of great duress. Like, I feel like Sam would be more on that side of things. And then Jordan's like, it's not gonna happen, right? Like, that is why people need religion, because you have this out of the box certainty. And in a world of seemingly increasing incomprehensibility, right? Where there is this inability to separate fact from fiction, people need some type of foothold of certainty. And so, I mean, I

• 1:10:55Tim Ferriss?

  think religion, I mean, it's, I don't have, I don't have to think it, it's already happening. But it's like, huge resurgence in religion.

• 1:11:01Chris Williamson?

  With Latin Mass as well, which is, Latin Mass is one of the, if not the, most ascendant attended religious services, and it's a service that's entirely done in a language that nobody in the audience speaks. And I wonder whether what, what that's doing is it's almost bypassing people's ability to scrutinize it. Well, that's obviously not true. And, you know, I can realize it's science.

• 1:11:24Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe they don't want to scrutinize it.

• 1:11:26Chris Williamson?

  That's the point. That's why I think that what they're doing is that they're purposefully going, oh, maybe it's just that it feels more archaic, it's more steeped in history, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe the music's better, I don't know. But yeah, I, I definitely get the sense that people are gonna scrabble around to try and reverse from first principles.

• 1:11:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:43Chris Williamson?

  How do I make myself feel good? But there is an interesting question, which is, if what we're bothered about is human flourishing, humans feeling good, why not have a comforting delusion? Let's say that it's delusion, I'm not saying that it is, but why not have a comforting delusion? Like, if the outcomes of religious people are more happiness, more meaning, they live longer, they've got better community, they've got better health, they've got ta ta ta ta ta ta.

• 1:12:07Tim Ferriss?

  Suddenly seems very rational instead of irrational.

• 1:12:10Chris Williamson?

  So this is what I learned from Alex O'Connor, and it is Richard Dawkins speaking to Ayaan Hirsi Ali on stage. And Ayaan was supposed to be the fifth horseman of the atheist apocalypse, but she couldn't make the meeting that day. And then Ayaan is on stage talking to Richard, and the audience is sort of half her, her fans and half Richard's. And she said, I wanted to take my own life not long ago. I was really low and Religion found me, Jesus found me, or Christianity found me, God found me. And after the lowest moment that I had, um, I'm really, really happy to say that my mental health's in a better place and I'm religious. And you know, you get the sort of smattering of kind of like empathetic applause around the room.

• 1:12:54Chris Williamson?

  And Alex told me that Richard's almost immediate response was, yes, but do you really think that Jesus moved the stone out of the way on the third day of Aramea? And what you see is a guy who is playing a game of optimizing for rationality whilst ignoring effectiveness. And you go, how can you say that it's anything but a positive when this person's life essentially was saved by this thing? And it makes me, and this is one of the reasons I think that atheism's not cool at the moment, that it feels in a world that's increasingly bereft of meaning, it feels like really sterile

• 1:13:38Chris Williamson?

  and quite judgmental and quite harsh. And it makes me, when I think about it, I'm like, I don't, it just doesn't seem very nice to me. And I'm aware, removing comforting delusions, why should you allow someone to indulge in their silly fantasy? I'm like, bro, I, I think we're getting toward the stage where comforting delusions are allowed. Because if not, so maybe it is, maybe it is Mormonism.

• 1:14:03Speaker 03

  Do you guys, intellectuals oftentimes get into this territory where they try to use proof by counter example? So they'll try to find one counter example in something that you're saying and then effectively void the whole thing. It's a very common thing because this is what you do in a math setting or anything. And they, they tend to do that in kind of a religious setting as well. And it's like, that's not applicable here. Just because X, Y, Z, X is not true, doesn't mean, invalidates the rest of it. And this is why people tend to like, you know, I think Richard Dawkins, like religion is a pick and choose kind of buffet. You know, you can go pick and believe in something.

• 1:14:42Chris Williamson?

  He also did say that AI is sentient.

• 1:14:45Speaker 03

  Sentient with Claude, right?

• 1:14:46Chris Williamson?

  How old's Richard though now? Seventies.

• 1:14:50George Mack?

  Seventies. I think as soon as anybody gets over sixty five, you've got to give them a little bit of. Leeway? Public breathing, breathing room, yeah. Why?

• 1:14:59George Mack?

  Have you been around anybody over sixty five? Richard Dawkins? Yeah. Yeah. I was on stage with him. He said that he would consider trying psychedelics. Oh, wow. I managed to get him to admit to that. That was fun. But yeah.

• 1:15:10Speaker 03

  What'd you guys think of that? The Richard Dawkins play? I mean, if anybody would go around and figure out if there is sentience associated with AI, maybe Richard Dawkins might be an okay person to go and figure that out. I don't know. I don't know how much you guys, but I'm curious to get your thoughts on what he discovered or how he discovered it.

• 1:15:27Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it's way above my pay grade. I have no idea. I would need people to define sentience and also like there, whenever we get into sentience consciousness, I'm like, let's just, let's make, before we argue about what God does or doesn't like, let's define God similarly, right? I would just want to make sure I understand those terms. Cause once you get into like integrated information theory and all this stuff, it's very easy to like get into these weeds and then you're like thirty pages into reading this, and I don't think anyone quite defined what the fuck they mean by conscious. So I don't know, I don't actually know the context.

• 1:16:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:00Tim Ferriss?

  But I certainly have no strong position.

• 1:16:02George Mack?

  Same thing's kind of true with meaning though. You know, I've read Baumeister's paper on meaning, meaning happiness, that kind of legendary one from twenty ten, I think it is. And hey, they're good, eh?

• 1:16:12Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, they're very tasty. I don't know what's in them.

• 1:16:14George Mack?

  Fifteen milligrams of caffeine and then some tasty shit. Sorry if I'm completely off here. What? But part of me thinks that, well, for, again, I hate to sound. The optimism. I hate to sound like I'm doing an affiliate link for the beginning of infinity, which I am. I'll post it in the link. But problems are infinite. So even now is a great example. So AI, which is first off, we're having this hypothetical conversation about this hypothetical thing, which I think could happen, but it's completely hypothetical. But assuming that hypothetical is true, we first have the problem of, well, if this AI is so smart, why can't it fix this? Cause those two things seem paradoxical. We'd need to want to fix it. Yeah. Which again, um, which is a different question, but if it is so smart, why can't it fix it is the first point.

• 1:16:56George Mack?

  The second point is, even now, are we not having quite a meaningful conversation like about this problem? Is this not an example where this hypothetical AI has solved everything, yet it hasn't solved meaning? And we're now constantly talking about how we're going to get more meaning for human beings?

• 1:17:09Chris Williamson?

  I don't think that the problem isn't necessarily that meaning would be impossible to access, but if you make meaning harder to access, you end up with some pretty gnarly outcomes in the same way as it's not impossible to eat healthily, but it is harder to not be fat in a calorie dense, high processed food environment. And if you make it a meaning oasis, it's sparser to get to meaning, then it makes life harder for everybody to find that.

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  Can I ask a dumb question?

• 1:17:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:40Speaker 03

  Is it how to open the toothpicks?

• 1:17:42Tim Ferriss?

  I was, I was watching you. Send him here. Back to the, back to the factory.

• 1:17:48Speaker 03

  Also, I have another.

• 1:17:48Tim Ferriss?

  Talk to this co-pac.

• 1:17:49Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, amazing. I want, I have another dumb question, which is, how do most people or normal people think about meaning? Like, how do they define it? What is the underlying element of?

• 1:18:00Tim Ferriss?

  I think, I mean, the way they're like, I don't know if I'm normal, I'm probably pretty abnormal, but I mean, I do think that like, meaning may be the wrong term to use because you can apply it to defining a term, you could apply it to was this conversation meaningless or meaningful? Well, yeah, we talked about a bunch of stuff that we is mutually intelligible. So like, yeah, sure, by definition, it's meaningful. But I think we could say purpose, like people feeling they have a purpose, right? There is a point to what they're doing or their life in general, right? Is sort of how I would think. I just, the,

• 1:18:40Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, that's, that's if I had to put in a placeholder, that's what I would sort of.

• 1:18:46Speaker 03

  Western society always attributes, you know, when you go to a party. What do you do, Tim? What do you do? Like, you know, this is a canonical question that people ask. It's like. Oh, what do I do? What do you do? Like.

• 1:18:59Chris Williamson?

  What do you do at a party? What do you do?

• 1:19:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know. The cocktail party question. The cocktail party question. I tend to try to not ask this question anymore, but I used to. And it's always funny. Trade heroin on the dark web is usually. There you go. I mean, that would be a good.

• 1:19:13Chris Williamson?

  Just to code up what he really does.

• 1:19:14Speaker 03

  Amazing great. They're like, oh, OK.

• 1:19:16Chris Williamson?

  It's better than saying podcast.

• 1:19:18Speaker 03

  But like, that is. Pretty similar, actually. It's a job. The attribute of Western society, to a certain extent, with all the focus on productivity and looking at your calendar and managing your time and, you know, sort of going from meeting to meeting to meeting and then having a full schedule and organizing, you know, a meetup one month later with your friends and putting it on the calendar. It's so fascinating because effectively, a lot of people treat it as allocating time.

• 1:19:50Speaker 03

  And if they allocate time, that's what kind of where people are trying to do. And oftentimes, going back to this, the reason why I ask what you do is a lot of the meaning elements for individuals is tied to their craft, their job, their sort of livelihood.

• 1:20:09Chris Williamson?

  Is it possible to have meaning without resistance? Because I was thinking about the chess example that you were talking about. But part of the reason that the game of chess is meaningful is that you're meeting resistance, even if the resistance is of another player and not the best player in the world that would be a computer. But part of that requires some sort of friction in the system. There's very few things that I can think of that are meaningful that are also totally frictionless. So there is no challenge in it.

• 1:20:36Speaker 03

  Going back to this, like, think about relationships.

• 1:20:41Speaker 03

  We made access to relationships kind of less friction than ever. You get a catalog of individuals, browse through, find the next person, on to the next.

• 1:20:52Speaker 03

  Wow. I mean, you've created it sort of an abundant layer on what was previously scarce. And.

• 1:20:59Chris Williamson?

  Then you have grinder, which is post-abundance.

• 1:21:01Speaker 03

  Post-abundance. Yeah, there you go.

• 1:21:04Speaker 03

  Have you guys heard about sniffies?

• 1:21:05George Mack?

  No, no, no.

• 1:21:07Speaker 03

  It's like a new gay sex anonymous sex app.

• 1:21:10George Mack?

  Okay, what, what, how are they innovating on Grindr? What went wrong?

• 1:21:13Speaker 03

  Well, this is what I know because I have some friends.

• 1:21:15Chris Williamson?

  What were they serving? What were they serving that the Grindr app wasn't?

• 1:21:19George Mack?

  How do you spell that, by the way? Is it S?

• 1:21:22Speaker 03

  Exactly what you.

• 1:21:23George Mack?

  I've got to end this podcast.

• 1:21:25Tim Ferriss?

  Both phones ping.

• 1:21:27Speaker 03

  I was like, hold on. Match Group just put in a hundred million dollars into the app. And it's growing like crazy.

• 1:21:32George Mack?

  People don't talk about the monop- I used to have this thing that if, one of the reasons why it was never discussed in Parliament or never discussed in Congress. Was who owns Pornhub? What's the name, uh, name of the company? Is it MindGeek?

• 1:21:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:46George Mack?

  MindGeek had, whilst, whilst the Congress was talking about the monopoly that Google had, that Meta had, MindGeek had the most absurd monopoly of the pornography industry, which you'd argue there's a free market solution, the OnlyFans came along and good old OnlyFans fixing the market.

• 1:22:02Speaker 03

  Democratizing porn.

• 1:22:04George Mack?

  Another example is the dating apps. If you look at who owns all the dating apps, I'm pretty sure Match, I'm pretty sure they own Match, Tinder, Hinge. I don't know if they now.

• 1:22:13Speaker 03

  Pretty much everything. No, no, Bumble's public.

• 1:22:16George Mack?

  Okay, so Bumble's separate.

• 1:22:17Chris Williamson?

  Raya maybe.

• 1:22:19Speaker 03

  Raya's separate too. Match Group owns everything except for Raya and Bumble roughly.

• 1:22:22George Mack?

  But it's crazy that they're allowed such a monopoly on what is now modern dating and nobody discusses it because it's sort of icky to discuss.

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  The market's so difficult to define in some sense.

• 1:22:32Tim Ferriss?

  Those apps are also really struggling. There's been a massive downturn in all those apps.

• 1:22:36Chris Williamson?

  Whitney Wolfe Heard's been saying recently that Bumble is going to have my AI avatar, date your AI avatar, and then it will feed that back up.

• 1:22:45Speaker 03

  Did you see, there was an interview she just did like last week or whatever? And she's like, this is the end of the swipe era and Bumble's introducing this sort of AI matchmaker or whatever.

• 1:22:54Chris Williamson?

  Jared, you ever considered that you might have a drinking problem? I don't consider a lot, Chris. Well, you drank an entire case of Athletic Brewing Co. last night. But they're non-alcoholic. And that's not a problem? Sorry, man. I, I just kept chugging, waiting for the regret to creep in. Never happened. See, most people like Jared don't want to change what they drink. They just don't want the next day to be a complete write-off. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Co. They make the best NA brews on the planet.

• 1:23:29Chris Williamson?

  You can find Athletic Brewing Co.'s best selling lineup at grocery or liquor stores near you, or best option, get a full variety pack of four flavors shipped direct to your door. Right now, get 15% off your first online order by going to the link in the description below, or heading to athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom, using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom, a modern wisdom at checkout. Near beer. Terms and conditions apply. Athletic Brewing Company, fit for all times. Bottoms up.

• 1:24:01Speaker 03

  But going back to your point, Chris, which was the idea, the capitalism removes friction, right? Like, the idea is that you have this invisible layer in society, sort of, that is, that is fixing supply and demand such that there's this equilibrium at all times. And turns out that reduces friction because accessibility, I mean, DoorDash, you can, like, I can get an Amazon delivery in 15, 30 minutes.

• 1:24:29Chris Williamson?

  You got a fancy dress outfit in less than an hour yesterday. Yeah, because that's what I do on a Sunday. Needed a costume, needed a costume. It's one of these new apps.

• 1:24:38Speaker 03

  I mean, it was remarkable.

• 1:24:40Chris Williamson?

  I need a furry with a cape. And then went straight onto Whistler or whatever.

• 1:24:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was in, I was in, I was in like a Carmel and I didn't have a bathing suit because people were going in the pool or whatever. It was like, oh, I can just DoorDash it in 30 minutes. And somebody will bring me a bathing suit because I didn't have, and that's, that's remarkable. And I think going back to this, it's like, yeah, obviously, I think it reduces value of things when the friction goes down.

• 1:25:05George Mack?

  I do think a great example is Winston Churchill. I posted this the other day. Churchill's biography is so good. You go, Jesus Christ, did this man.

• 1:25:13Chris Williamson?

  Which one?

• 1:25:14George Mack?

  The big, I think it's Andrew Roberts Churchill biography. First off, Jared, could you pull that up? How many times Winston Churchill nearly died? He outbeats a cat, like, the number of, I think he almost drowned. He gets

• 1:25:25Chris Williamson?

  What the terminal velocity of Winston Churchill.

• 1:25:27George Mack?

  He gets, he gets ran over, but Churchill used to, and famously a sufferer of depression, as he called it, black dog. He used to plant, uh, sorry, he used to lay 200 bricks per day for a, a significant period of his life, just to keep himself busy.

• 1:25:43Tim Ferriss?

  What was he building with those 200 bricks?

• 1:25:45George Mack?

  Apparently, apparently he wasn't actually that good to the stories that the asshole bricklayers came in afterwards, but he would always do, yeah, you can have a look. So here we go, like, yeah, he battlefield dangers in Cuba, India, Sudan and South Africa, escaped from, yeah, he was, he escaped from the Boer prison of war camp. Frontline combat in World War One, got hit by a car.

• 1:26:02Tim Ferriss?

  Believed he was preserved for a purpose.

• 1:26:04George Mack?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:05Tim Ferriss?

  Felt he was walking with destiny.

• 1:26:06George Mack?

  Winston Churchill famously said when he was a, I believe a teenager, that I will save Western civilization, which is up there with John D Rockefeller saying, I will become the richest man ever to exist, called their shots, but for every Churchill, for every Rockefeller, there's a thousand dickheads.

• 1:26:20Chris Williamson?

  Massive survival.

• 1:26:21George Mack?

  Who are in Newcastle right now.

• 1:26:22Chris Williamson?

  All right. So I, I got in trouble, speaking of the UK, uh, I got in trouble for comparing the UK to where it would rank if it was a state. And I thought that this was a relatively innocuous thing to say, because me and George are both shit on the UK quite a bit. You know, you're allowed to, you're allowed to as immigrants, having moved from your own country, you're allowed to sort of cast a spurt. Well, this is why I left, so to speak. We were the second in the world in millionaire exits, not long ago, second only to China, who's got, you know, like 30 times the population or something. So, uh, I decided to post this chart and this chart explains if the UK was a state, where it would rank on the list. Here it is. If the UK were a US state, where would it rank among 50 states? So life expectancy first, lowest homicide rate first, lowest gun deaths first, lowest

• 1:27:07Chris Williamson?

  prisoner population first, healthcare coverage first, paid maternity leave first.

• 1:27:11Tim Ferriss?

  Lot of high numbers.

• 1:27:12Chris Williamson?

  Statutory paid holiday first, years in education first, lowest road deaths first, lowest drug deaths second.

• 1:27:19Tim Ferriss?

  Oh.

• 1:27:19Chris Williamson?

  Minimum wage third, pupil performance fifth, environmental performance fifth, human development index ninth, lowest obesity 10th, and GDP per capita 51st.

• 1:27:31Tim Ferriss?

  What do you attribute that to?

• 1:27:33Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean.

• 1:27:34Tim Ferriss?

  The 51st.

• 1:27:35Chris Williamson?

  The fact that it's 51st? The fact that the US just absolutely rules when it comes to capitalism? You guys are like the Floyd Mayweather of capitalism.

• 1:27:42Tim Ferriss?

  Would most countries, I know that the UK is not, Europe, you know, Brexit is Brexit, but like, would, would other, would countries in Western Europe also look like this in terms of GDP per capita? Probably, right?

• 1:27:55Chris Williamson?

  I would guess so. I mean, what people on the internet got mad at me for is, well, these are stupid things to judge. Obviously, you've got the lowest gun deaths because you cucks gave up your guns.

• 1:28:07Chris Williamson?

  The paid maternity leave doesn't matter when this thing, the statutory paid holiday is pointless because the level of productivity, the road deaths are because you don't have big enough roads or something. The drug deaths don't matter because you've got no cool drugs. The minimum, like, there was, there was basically an American excuse for every single one of these. Even the lowest obesity. I know it's like, it was just surprising to me because for the most part, British people are very prepared to laugh at Britain. Very prepared to point and we've.

• 1:28:37Tim Ferriss?

  Very British thing.

• 1:28:38Chris Williamson?

  We've, I've done episode, I've done entire episodes on this is what's wrong and this is what's wrong and this is what's wrong and this is what's wrong. But as soon as you begin to compare the US to the UK and in some areas, because the whole joke here is that there's lots of things that were ranking better than the US in, apart from one of the most important things, which is how much fucking money we make. And yeah, they're selective, but.

• 1:29:05Tim Ferriss?

  Sing it.

• 1:29:06Chris Williamson?

  Huh?

• 1:29:06Tim Ferriss?

  You can sing it if you want.

• 1:29:07Chris Williamson?

  Sing what?

• 1:29:08Tim Ferriss?

  God save our gracious king. God save our.

• 1:29:17Chris Williamson?

  Right. So I just got in a lot of shit and I was surprised. I thought that Americans would be able to take this with a bit more humility.

• 1:29:24Tim Ferriss?

  I do tend to think the Americans.

• 1:29:24Chris Williamson?

  Also humility first.

• 1:29:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:30Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, lowest drug deaths is, I mean, like Wyoming.

• 1:29:34Speaker 03

  Do you think America will be lowest obesity at some point very soon? With the advent of GLPs and?

• 1:29:42Chris Williamson?

  They're gonna be, someone, I saw this thing the other day that Red A True Tide is gonna be one of the most successful drugs in history.

• 1:29:48Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 1:29:49Chris Williamson?

  They're one of the most widely used drugs.

• 1:29:51George Mack?

  Scott Galloway has the idea, he says it's the best, America's the best place to earn money and Europe's the best place to spend money.

• 1:29:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, the UK is a wonderful country to be poor in and a horrible country to be rich in, and America is a great country to be rich in and a horrible country to be poor in.

• 1:30:07Speaker 03

  Which is kind of interesting if the, um, the value of the dollar goes up. It's like American productivity, GDP or whatever goes up. And it's, Americans will go and spend it to Europe, right? And get the best value for the bang for the buck, or if you will.

• 1:30:22George Mack?

  Yeah. I, I mean, I, I do think the UK is, is, is the greatest, the country of all time. I do think that's like a fact. But America's, America's going through its golden age right now.

• 1:30:35Chris Williamson?

  Just, we're living on borrowed time, mate. You know my position on this. I think that we're living on borrowed time. And this is seen nowhere more clearly than the arrests, countries with the most arrests for posting on social media in 2023. United Kingdom, 12,183, coming in at nearly double second place, which was Belarus with 6,205. And Russia is down with 400, China with 1,500. Might be some reporting problems in a couple of those countries. But that number, which is from the Times, it was a Times.

• 1:31:06George Mack?

  Ministry of Social Enforcement isn't returning their emails.

• 1:31:10Speaker 03

  To be part of.

• 1:31:12Chris Williamson?

  12,000 arrests for posting on social media in 2023. And that number's from the Times with Freedom House stats. So that's legit. 12,183. And that was one of the most common. How many people, like, where would you rank if it was the number of people that have been? And I'm like, also first, actually. So.

• 1:31:31George Mack?

  Yeah, we have made some mistakes over the years. Alan Shering.

• 1:31:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:35George Mack?

  Oscar Wilde.

• 1:31:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Not good. We don't treat our gays well.

• 1:31:39George Mack?

  No.

• 1:31:39Chris Williamson?

  We haven't.

• 1:31:40George Mack?

  Alan Carr, pretty good.

• 1:31:41Chris Williamson?

  Alan Carr's treated well. Yeah. Douglas Murray treated relatively well. Yeah.

• 1:31:47George Mack?

  I had this, because I find now that every time you bring up some negative about the UK, I would bring up something positive to counteract it. Yeah. Like the angel and the devil, the north, the northeast and the northwest, which is, I was back home in London, central London, and I was walking around these beautiful buildings in London. And I used to live in a house that's older than America. And some of the architecture that exists in the UK, like New York has some quite, like the New York City Library is beautiful. It feels like you guys have stolen that from us. And even the Statue of Liberty is from France, right? But like, a lot of the architecture in the US, my friend summarized it great, which is everything looks like the back entrance.

• 1:32:30George Mack?

  So even the front, it looks like what would be the back entrance. And I feel as a Brit being in America, like my parents have the most beautiful place in the world. And I'm around this mess of a house where the people are just, it's a lot more functional right now. But the UK has, the architecture is stunning. And you don't make buildings like that anymore. We're really grasping at fucking straws though when we're talking about the architecture. Big Ben's good. Big Ben's good. That's the difference between the US and the UK is that it feels that everything in the US has, or a lot of things in the US, I shall fix, has a functional name. So I was like, why is it called Joshua Tree? It's like, oh, it's because it has a lot of Joshua trees. Or like, you have Temp Street.

• 1:33:14George Mack?

  I go, why is it Temp Street? Because it's next to Ninth Street and before Eleventh Street. Whereas Big Ben, nobody really knows why it's called Big Ben. We think it was after some bloke called Ben, but it's not actually been clarified. The big, Big Ben is the, it's not the actual clock, it's the bell that's inside of it, I think. Have a look, because I remember I went down a Big Ben rabbit hole and I couldn't find it out, yeah.

• 1:33:36Speaker 03

  It's remarkable how, if you think about it in the grander scheme of things, young, how young America is. It's like, what is it, like a teenager, maybe less or something with respect to civilization or modern civilization? And turns out everything is kind of, whereas if you were to create a blank slate of a country and now you Use the best of whatever exists and maybe try to recreate it.

• 1:33:59Chris Williamson?

  This is kind of what Dubai's done, right? In a way, like you think about Dubai from an infrastructure standpoint, it's just totally like.

• 1:34:05Speaker 03

  Artificial.

• 1:34:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's it's absolutely just plowed its way through the desert and said, how do we want to have our roads? How do we want to have our downtown? I know that there's lots of roads accidents that you said, I wasn't aware of this. But if you're driving in Dubai, you can be doing 70 miles an hour and looking at Google Maps and you're three minutes from your destination, which is in the middle of a built up area. You're just like pounding it and then you peel off on this perfectly modern designed flyover. And then you're deposited outside of the fountains at the bottom of the Burj or whatever. So that's kind of interesting.

• 1:34:36Speaker 03

  Whereas if you drive in London, it'll take you like 30 minutes.

• 1:34:40Chris Williamson?

  London's okay, but I mean, once you've been to LA, everything feels

• 1:34:43Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 1:34:44Chris Williamson?

  Fucking unbelievable.

• 1:34:46Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I mean, you know, I've chatted about this before, but I'm just increasingly bullish on neuromodulation. And there was a, there was a piece in the New York Times.

• 1:34:59Tim Ferriss?

  Could at home brain stimulation reduce psychiatry's reliance on SSRIs? And I think part of the framing challenge around, and just to define terms here. So brain stimulation in this particular case, I believe in that New York Times piece is referring to something called TDCS, where you can basically use, I think it's TDCS, where you can basically use a nine volt battery. It's a headset that you can wear at home and it's intended to treat depressive disorder. And then you have other types of neuromodulation. And I use that term because you might not be stimulating, you might not be exciting something, you might be inhibiting something. So that would include

• 1:35:39Tim Ferriss?

  TMS, which I've spent a lot of time with, so transcranial magnetic stimulation. So you're using magnets with different targets, depending on what you're trying to do. And I think those are just, it's the very, very, that's the model T of what's coming with, with neuromodulation. And I think there's going to be a lot of acceleration in the next two years. I think it's going to move a lot faster than people expect.

• 1:36:07Chris Williamson?

  How does it work?

• 1:36:08Tim Ferriss?

  Well, so for instance, you might have, in say my case, right? So what I figured out, it took me my whole life to figure it out, but a few years ago is that even though I had. Kind of been diagnosed diagnosed myself prior to that as someone with some type of depressive disorder. I think that it was a combination of a few things. Number one was Lyme disease, which is like very much multiple times verified real Lyme disease, not like chronic fatigue masquerading as Lyme disease from Long Island, which is if you look at the CDC map, the Center for Disease Control, it is like

• 1:36:48George Mack?

  Bullseye.

• 1:36:49Tim Ferriss?

  The is the bullseye outbreak, pun intended, because you sometimes get a rash, it looks like a bullseye. But I think that a lot of psychiatric conditions are downstream of acute infections that then led to chronic neuroinflammation. That's taking us a little further afield from the point I was going to make, which is you can use these magnetic pulses in the case of something like accelerated TMS. And in my case, I realized that it was actually anxiety and rumination. So a combination, the DSM constantly changes in terms of how you diagnose these things. Psychiatry is kind of where surgery was like 300 years ago, I would say, right? It's very early days. But if I do an FMRI, right? So you're getting

• 1:37:31Tim Ferriss?

  this imaging of the brain, you identify targets for, say, anxiety, like anxiomatic target, you can inhibit or excite, depending on what you're trying to do, a target with these magnetic pulses, intermittent theta bursts is what it's called. And it just feels like a light tapping on your head. That's it. It's very tolerable. And in my case, you might do, for instance, in the latest round of what I've done, take something, it's a drug. So you take a neuroplasticity agent beforehand. And there are a lot of things that can increase neuroplasticity. But in this case, it's a somewhat antiquated, maybe antibiotic called

• 1:38:13Tim Ferriss?

  D-cycloserine. So you stick it in your mouth, you let it dissolve for an hour before the stems, and then you're doing three minutes on the hour, or maybe even every half hour for 10 stems. And that's it. And I got three to four months of going from, say, eight or nine out of like, generalized anxiety and just OCD rumination to like, a zero or a one.

• 1:38:37George Mack?

  Wow.

• 1:38:38Tim Ferriss?

  Different people. I mean, those are two different lived experiences. And

• 1:38:42George Mack?

  And then after three or four months it

• 1:38:44Tim Ferriss?

  Starts to creep back in and then you can go get say a booster of some type. And I know people with depression specifically, there's a lot more data on depression of different types. Who basically similarly got taken from like, I can't move, I'm at home. Some people are cutting and they go from like, again, this, I'm not a doctor, I'm not giving medical advice. And these are anecdotes, but there are also published studies people can look into. There's a great scientist named Jonathan Downer, unfortunate name for being someone looking, working with someone in depression. But amazing scientist, D O W N A R, people can look him up. Uh, I think he's at the University of Toronto. And you see durability in some people, including the, the son of a friend of mine, 18 months.

• 1:39:29Tim Ferriss?

  So instead of three to four months, you get like 18 months. And so you can be, start to wonder, it's like, all right, if we look at, let's just say SSRIs, which are miraculous for some people. But the general chemical imbalance theory of depression or anxiety is pretty much thoroughly debunked at this point, right? You're not depressed because you have low serotonin levels by and large. And when you take pharmaceuticals, I'm sure it's true with GLP ones. I don't think there's a, very rarely a biological free lunch, but let's put that aside. With psychiatric medications, typically you have off-target effects, right? They're going to be side effects, they could be sexual dysfunction, they could be whatever.

• 1:40:14Tim Ferriss?

  Their weight gain, there are a million different options. And often they stop working or people don't need them anymore. And then there's no plan for de-prescribing and off-ramping these people. So they just stay on forever, right? So the idea that you could use electricity is super, super, super interesting. And I think I'm hopeful that it will displace a lot of the blunt instrument approach to using over prescription. We'll see, I mean, it's going to take a lot of tech innovation, which in this case, AI. Go team AI is going to accelerate things a lot. Certainly already seeing it.

• 1:40:55George Mack?

  But like a personal level, what's it like going from, did you say a nine to a one?

• 1:41:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, like an eight or nine to a one.

• 1:41:02George Mack?

  What's that like as like a felt

• 1:41:03Tim Ferriss?

  Insomnia is gone, right? Like instead of taking 30 to 60 minutes to fall asleep, like laid down, five minutes later, I'm asleep without any sleep medication. I mean, that alone is it's impossible to overstate the effect that has on your daily life every day, right?

• 1:41:23Tim Ferriss?

  Easier to get over just kind of the scrapes and bruises of life, right? Little issues. You basically, for me, it was like, I find it very useful. Like if I'm using the toolkit of Stoicism or mindfulness or whatever, like it's a fucking struggle, right? It's not native to my constitution. But after this, like, oh, wow, suddenly I can meditate for 20 minutes and I feel like I've been doing it for years as opposed to constantly like

• 1:41:52Tim Ferriss?

  slapping my monkey mind on the wrist, right? So really tremendous. And I, I, what we will see is that you can also use it. This is not that controversial, but for performance enhancement, right? Like you can, um, I believe you can affect like handedness, trait hypnotizability, like you can, and it's not risk free, but compared to a lot of the mecha, the medications that you might get people for these conditions, the risk profile is pretty good.

• 1:42:23Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting that you can have an intervention that makes other interventions more effective. So if you can do some sort of TMS thing and that makes your trait hypnotizability more, that means that you now opened up the world of hypnotism.

• 1:42:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you're, you're exactly. So you're choosing the right domino to tip over first, right? And I mean,

• 1:42:47Chris Williamson?

  It's not the time to get into a porn habit then, straight after this. God, god damn it, I've just locked this in.

• 1:42:52Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, it brings up.

• 1:42:53Chris Williamson?

  Whistler or tickler or whatever it's called.

• 1:42:56Tim Ferriss?

  Also a good podcast.

• 1:42:59Tim Ferriss?

  This podcast is sponsored by.

• 1:43:04Tim Ferriss?

  When I sit down for a good wank on Pornhub with my athletic brew.

• 1:43:08Chris Williamson?

  I go on TikTok. Do you want a man to come around in two minutes?

• 1:43:14Tim Ferriss?

  Man on man.

• 1:43:18Tim Ferriss?

  Life and times.

• 1:43:21Tim Ferriss?

  A lot, I mean, a lot of what I think about is just sequencing, right? Like, there's a lot of stuff out there off the rack that works, kind of, right? But if you figure out the right sequence, like you can suddenly, it's true with language acquisition, too. Like, where most of the mistakes are made, I think, is in the sequencing. And you just fix the sequencing, you shuffle things a little bit, you put the right domino in front.

• 1:43:43Tim Ferriss?

  And it makes a huge difference. And also, this is true with psychedelics, in the sense that Ghul Dolan, who's at UC Berkeley, she used to be at Hopkins, but her sort of framework of reopening critical windows with the use of psychedelics is very interesting. So. And underground facilitators have known this for a long time. But it's like the two or three weeks after a psychedelic, which in this case would include MDMA, although that's a longer conversation. You have the ability, and this could extend to, say, stroke patients who are trying to relearn motor control or speaking, things that typically is limited to a very short, relatively short window as a child, right? You can

• 1:44:25Tim Ferriss?

  basically reopen the malleability to develop those things using these drugs in the subsequent two to three weeks. So. For instance, if you've just done a bunch of psychedelics, maybe a very bad time to suddenly do a bunch of overdosing on porn and sort of instilling habits that you would otherwise maybe come and go, but in this case could really stick, like your Play-Doh is has been warmed up in the microwave. So you want to be careful about those two or three weeks afterwards. I think that could also apply to TMS.

• 1:44:59Chris Williamson?

  Well, I did a two-sided SGB at the start of this year, and the same thing is true for that. It's like, hey, man, you've got a window here where your nervous system is unusually. Are absorbent. Yeah. So treated with appropriate care. Yeah. That was wild, though, the SGB that I had. You should explain what that is, maybe. Uh, stellate ganglion block. So um, there is a bundle of nerves on both sides of your neck that are essentially running to the rest of your nervous system. And you can get an ultrasound guided anesthetic injection that goes into it. And it essentially shakes the etch a sketch of your nervous system. It is a way to think about it. It is a relatively hard reset. And you do one side and then you do another. You can't do them both together because it actually makes half of your face

• 1:45:44Chris Williamson?

  and half of your throat go to sleep. So if you were to do both, I think that you you might die. You certainly wouldn't be able to swallow. You can't do much stuff. Sounds problematic. You end up you end up with one side of your eyes, sort of eyelids half closed and speaking is a little bit difficult. Anyway, I did one side one day, one side on the other with Matt Cook at Bio Reset, who's kind of the number one in America for this. And um, it was fascinating, really, really fascinating experience. Do you do it again? I would, yes. What were the benefits? Uh, it was an interesting, an interesting slate clean of some nervous system buildup.

• 1:46:24Chris Williamson?

  So just agitations, uh, that sort of ambient buzzing that you often have, rumination reduced.

• 1:46:34Chris Williamson?

  It was it was very interesting, but I think the the thing that's always fascinating to me because you've got a felt sense of how this thing impacted you. And because our felt sense is so subject to, did I sleep well? I'm in a good place with this person. Have I got the, you know, how's business going? What's happening in my life? But when you see in data too, and because I track everything with Whoop, it was a 30% increase in HRV. I was gonna ask you about HRV. The 30% increase in HRV overnight. And that held for, I mean, I'm what, three, four months now after it started to tickle back down now. But that held for a long time and resting heart rate also did the same, not quite as much. It was basically a 30% change in HRV and that stuck about for a while.

• 1:47:19Chris Williamson?

  And they do this, it's a one stop shop for PTSD in soldiers. It's a really aggressive intervention for guys that are like super, super, super struggling. It just. It just gives you a little bit more room to breathe. And I was, I was interested in it. And I trust Matt, the guy that did it. So I was like, okay. You, you mentioned before, um, risks with the, the, the TMS type stuff. What, what are some of the risks?

• 1:47:45Tim Ferriss?

  Generally very low. I mean, I would say that again, not a, uh, not a PhD or doctor. Don't play one on the internet. So do your homework, talk to your professionals. But, uh, my understanding is that, well, I can give you my personal example. Right. Uh, occasionally in the case with my target, with my brain, uh, after the treatment, you can have what's almost like a rebound exaggeration of symptoms for a short period of time, which is pretty unpleasant, where you might have insomnia for a few days, which I did. I've had that twice.

• 1:48:19Chris Williamson?

  And you've done, you've done this twice?

• 1:48:21Tim Ferriss?

  No, I've done it probably five or six times and it's, it's not, it has not worked a hundred percent of the time, which is very frustrating. It's part of the reason why, and I'm supporting, uh, a nascent brain stimulation lab here at UT Austin, um, getting involved with a couple of the companies because I want to, like, I actually know these machines and I've talked to the technicians and I've talked to the scientists. I'm like, I can actually be very, I think, helpful here. So I'm hoping to figure out how you can make that much more reliable. It's also just pure self-interest, right? I want to be able to use this. And I also want to figure out how to get durability out further, right? Instead of three to four months, it's like, look, if it's one day every quarter, like, and it goes from a nine to a one, fantastic. But if only it works, once out of every four shots,

• 1:49:06Tim Ferriss?

  then that sucks, uh, in, in, in a lot of respects. So some of the side effects, the insomnia that I mentioned, uh, in very, very rare cases, people will get, uh, temporary tinnitus, they'll get like a ringing. Uh, these are, these are all pretty uncommon. Uh, and I should say that the.

• 1:49:27Tim Ferriss?

  Using this for generalized anxiety disorder, OCD, et cetera, is very much tip of the spear stuff. So the sample size is not very large. With the depression, there's much more data. And you can go on PubMed or elsewhere. Consensus Data App is another decent option if you want, like an AI interface. And look at the published papers. They're right there for you.

• 1:49:51Tim Ferriss?

  If you are like smacking down your sympathetic nervous system, okay, this is the perfect place to talk about this on a large podcast. After my first effective TMS treatment, the first one that worked, I could not ejaculate for like two weeks and I fucking lost it. You can imagine, I'm just like, I'm like, is this a good news, bad news situation? Like, yeah, good news, you're not as anxious. Bad news, you're never going to ejaculate again. I was like, what the fucking? The doctor was like, yeah, we've never seen that before. I was like, oh, fantastic. But eventually mechanistically, he was like, it could be a dosing problem where we're basically, we dialed down the volume on your sympathetic nervous system too much. Paras sympathetic to get erect, sympathetic to come. Yeah, they say point and shoot. Paras sympathetic.

• 1:50:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yep. Sympathetic. Damn. Yeah. And I was like, okay, well, maybe we try a lower dose, which I think is part of the reason why it didn't work for me because I try, I was like, hey, if that was at the time, that was five days. And I was like, I really didn't enjoy those two weeks. So let's try. How much are you trying to come? Let's try two days. I'm a big fan of ejaculating.

• 1:50:59Tim Ferriss?

  You know? Sounds like we found the title. Yeah, you need to get on Whistler. So I need to get. Tickler. Tickler. Sniffies. Yeah. My podcast is accepting sponsors, tickler. So then I tried two days, nothing, right? Then I tried three days, a few months later. It's increasing. Nothing. Right. And then eventually got back to five days, still nothing. But then went back to adding the, the D-cyclosterin, this plasticity agent beforehand, one day, boom. And I was like, okay. Now that is when I became much more, it's called the one, it's just called one day protocol. And Jonathan Downer, who I mentioned, is one of the, if not the sort of innovator in the space behind that, along with Don Vaughn and some other people. But.

• 1:51:47Tim Ferriss?

  That one day when that worked, I was like, now this is interesting because currently the insurers are slowly coming around, but all this stuff, a lot of innovation starts with people with money, spending way too much money.

• 1:52:00Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:52:01Tim Ferriss?

  Right. That's just the way it is, right? That's true with electric cars. It's true with Uber. It's true with a million different the early generation iPhones, right? Didn't even have to copy and paste. Are you fucking kidding me? Right? These early adopters who have money and they're willing to spend it, like the accelerated TMS protocol, some of the early rounds that I did, it's like all in 30 grand out of pocket. I mean, it's expensive. And when it got down to one day, I was like, okay. Now it's about reducing sort of a unit cost and increasing throughput with these devices. Because putting aside the out of pocket cost, a lot of people, they cannot take five days off of work.

• 1:52:42Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:52:42Tim Ferriss?

  Do this.

• 1:52:43Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:52:44Tim Ferriss?

  But once you get it to one day, now I'm like, okay, that just went from a very small sort of addressable patient population to much larger. Still too expensive, but let's try to work on getting it down. And that's just TMS, right? You have other things like focused ultrasound that might be interesting for different types of addiction, for instance, where you could actually get enough penetration that you'd hit, you could hit the nucleus accumbens and other anatomical structures associated with chemical dependence. It's like, okay, this is very, very, very interesting.

• 1:53:16Chris Williamson?

  Who's the best company in America for this at the moment?

• 1:53:18Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, there are a couple of really good ones. The, the two older ones are, uh, that have the most, uh, kind of time on the market are Brainsway, which is, uh, out of Israel, very good machines. It's a, it's a publicly traded company. Full disclosure, I, you know, I invested in them when they were a public traded company. Mag Venture has a device as well, which I've used. And then the company that I'm involved with is called AMPA and they, that is the smallest form factor and the people behind it develop the one day protocol. And, uh, I think they're sort of.

• 1:53:59Tim Ferriss?

  The trainability of that device, instead of taking weeks, or certainly instead of taking weeks, let's just say to train a technician properly, you can do it in a few hours. And it's something that fits in the trunk of a car, like a Corolla, as opposed to being the size of a refrigerator. And I think they're really, otherwise I wouldn't be involved, very well positioned to finally scale this treatment to millions of people instead of a hand, like a few thousand. So those, like, all three of those are on the market. And the lowest cost would certainly be AMPA, but all these devices.

• 1:54:35Chris Williamson?

  A M P E R?

• 1:54:36Tim Ferriss?

  A M P A, AMPA Health. And we'll see, we'll see. I mean, I am, I'll be, I mean, not just because I'm involved, because it took me a long time. I did a fuck ton of due diligence. I don't think, a lot of folks don't realize like how much due diligence I do before I put something in my newsletter or whatever. It's like, I guess this is OCD, like harnessed when I am in full throttle.

• 1:55:04Chris Williamson?

  Being used very well. Being friends with you is highly useful in situations like this. In the same way, I went to go and get LASIK in the UK. Ali Abdaal, productivity dude, British guy, is a doctor, right? Was an MD or the equivalent of an MD, GP in the, in the UK. And I knew that he'd got LASIK. And I was like, no one's done more research about who's the best obstetrician operator in, in all of the UK. Messaged Ali and he's like, yeah, I spent three weeks speaking to all of my friends and doing all of the reviews and looking at the particular, the particular machines. I was like, okay, who was that? He introduced me and it's funny, I mean, this is good. I just get to speedrun all of the work that you did.

• 1:55:47Tim Ferriss?

  Canary down the mine.

• 1:55:48Chris Williamson?

  I'm the end of the guy in the human centipede, but I'm benefiting.

• 1:55:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. You want to be first in line.

• 1:55:53Chris Williamson?

  I'm at the, I'm at the end, but it gets better progressively as it goes through.

• 1:55:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:58Chris Williamson?

  That's cool, man. I'm, I'm glad that it's, I'm glad that it's helped.

• 1:56:01Tim Ferriss?

  It's, it's, it is exciting. I mean, and. I mean, I think it's, I think it's saying something when, as somebody who's been so active in funding the science related to psychedelics and psychedelic system therapy since 2015, that in the last three years, I've done almost, almost no psychedelics. It's been purely focused on the neuromodulation. I think it's that important. We'll see because a lot, for a lot of people psychedelics are nuclear power for the psyche. Like you just, they are not suitable for all people. There are plenty of people I would carve out for exclusion from.

• 1:56:40Chris Williamson?

  Many times you end up with a Chernobyl or a Fukushima.

• 1:56:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's just, it's, it's a lot squirrelier. It is, you need to be really careful with that stuff.

• 1:56:50Chris Williamson?

  And as opposed to just not being able to come.

• 1:56:51Tim Ferriss?

  It has its place.

• 1:56:53George Mack?

  Yeah. Can I zoom in more on this? What was that like at the end of a few weeks? You know, you said you went from a nine to a one. Did you hit a minus seven?

• 1:57:03Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, I didn't. I mean, I was, I was, I was pretty, I was pretty.

• 1:57:08George Mack?

  Fukushima.

• 1:57:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I was, I was understandably concerned.

• 1:57:16Chris Williamson?

  Had you have known that it was going to end after two weeks, presumably you would have just been, the fear was this is going to be forever.

• 1:57:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Yeah. So now.

• 1:57:24Chris Williamson?

  But you couldn't feel the anxiety.

• 1:57:26Tim Ferriss?

  But, but interestingly, for, for like the, every time it has worked for me, I've had that side effect, but now I know that there's an endpoint. So don't freak out and it's fine.

• 1:57:36George Mack?

  Yeah. You just know that you're going to get a couple of really good weeks where you're kind of like a stallion. Babe, I can just, you know, don't worry about me.

• 1:57:46Speaker 03

  How do you, I had a question for you, you know, on, on the other side of the spectrum, have you seen these devices that simulate your vagus nerve or whatever?

• 1:57:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I know. I know a lot.

• 1:57:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. What are your thoughts on those? Like?

• 1:57:55Tim Ferriss?

  Most of them are bunk.

• 1:57:56Speaker 03

  Are they?

• 1:57:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. There, there's a scientist, you might want to have him on at some point. He's incredible. Named Kevin Tracy. He is the most credible. He wrote a book called The Great Nerve. He's the most credible.

• 1:58:11Tim Ferriss?

  Publicly, not really educating scientist credible, very highly published scientist who talks about this. Most of the non-invasive vagus nerve stimulators or that are purported to be vagus nerve stimulators don't, don't actually hit it the right way. And there's neck-based, and then there's ear-based. The neck TBD, but there are, they've been cleared, FDA cleared for, I think it's either migraines or cluster headaches.

• 1:58:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:58:48Tim Ferriss?

  Some people seem to benefit. I had a friend who tripled his HRV using a neck-based device. I think it was either TruVega or it was the prescription equivalent of TruVega. And it worked really well for him. This can be with you.

• 1:59:03Speaker 03

  I haven't used them. I had a friend I was talking to, I suffer from migraines.

• 1:59:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:07Speaker 03

  And so I have to carry around medication all the time. And somebody told me about these things and they're like, okay, it has all these benefits of like HRV, you know, increase of HRV, all sorts of stuff. It's a temporary state, if you will, but ultimately.

• 1:59:21Tim Ferriss?

  You should use it daily. It's like a few minutes in the morning, a few minutes.

• 1:59:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's kind of reset the nervous system. That's kind of the marketing terminology that they've been utilizing.

• 1:59:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, really, it's, what it's doing is it's stimulating the vagus nerve, which is really like two transatlantic cables on either side. It's like 100, roughly 100,000 fibers on either side. And then it innervates everything, just about. Organs, GI tract, et cetera. And when you stimulate it, you can, I guess the right way to put it, activate isn't quite right, but something called the inflammatory reflex. And so it can be applied to things like rheumatoid arthritis, different autoimmune disorders, can be applied to something like asthma attacks. It's very, very, very interesting. So.

• 2:00:16Tim Ferriss?

  It could be worth looking into for you, right? The neck-based devices tend to also activate the superficial muscles of the face. So it pulls your face down.

• 2:00:24Chris Williamson?

  It depends how high you turn it up.

• 2:00:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it depends on how high you turn it up, but it can be a little uncomfortable. The ear-based devices.

• 2:00:31Chris Williamson?

  You say you've used?

• 2:00:31Speaker 03

  No, somebody recommended me the ear-based device.

• 2:00:34Tim Ferriss?

  Most of the ear-based devices are not actually in the right place.

• 2:00:38Speaker 03

  Got it.

• 2:00:38Tim Ferriss?

  It needs to be very, very, very precise. It's called the Simba Concha. It's going to be hard to see. It's right here, kind of where this fold is. It's at the bottom of that inside, like right there. Most of the devices being sold on the market, including devices that have lots of fancy names and lots of fancy institutions on the website, they're not in the right place.

• 2:00:58Chris Williamson?

  There's a fucking shit ton of money behind some of those companies.

• 2:01:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, very few fibers make it to the ear.

• 2:01:05Chris Williamson?

  Got it. I've got a couple of things. I had a few things sent to me. I had one that's a handheld device with the two-pronged, and you can kind of just stick it on like you want it to.

• 2:01:15Tim Ferriss?

  Just tase yourself.

• 2:01:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, like that. And then there's a pair of headphones that have a lug that comes down and sits here. And obviously, that one's way, way more convenient. But it is some weird stuff with that. You've got to lubricate the end of the adapter because it needs to be able to have quite a smooth surface to be able to. So you have to change the, again, whistler, you have to change the little heads out on this thing and put that in. I didn't do it consistently enough to be able to say whether or not it was effective.

• 2:01:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I think for migraines, it's worth looking into.

• 2:01:49Chris Williamson?

  What's your migraine manifestation? Do you have aura with it?

• 2:01:53Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, yeah.

• 2:01:54Chris Williamson?

  Which one?

• 2:01:56Speaker 03

  What? What do you mean, which one?

• 2:01:57Chris Williamson?

  Olfactory visual?

• 2:01:58Speaker 03

  It's visual.

• 2:01:59Chris Williamson?

  Visual.

• 2:01:59Speaker 03

  And it'll come on and I can, I've had these since I was five years old and people were like, what the fuck is going on? I didn't even know. And yeah, you get these auras. It's like almost as you're on like an acid trip and everything just looks blurry but moving in a weird way. And then, and then after a while, if you don't take medication during that period.

• 2:02:21Chris Williamson?

  Then it kicks in.

• 2:02:22Speaker 03

  Then it kicks in.

• 2:02:22Chris Williamson?

  What do you take? Nortech?

• 2:02:24Speaker 03

  Sumatriptan.

• 2:02:25Tim Ferriss?

  Has one just kicked in?

• 2:02:26Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:02:27Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, fuck. I'm so sorry.

• 2:02:28Speaker 03

  It's no, no, it's all good. It's I don't even know. I think I typically track it with it's either lighting.

• 2:02:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 2:02:35Speaker 03

  It's environmental, like weather changes, weirdly enough, or the last element of it is either I have caffeine or wine without any food.

• 2:02:45Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:02:46Speaker 03

  And it's it's really fascinating is, you know, they they ask you to keep a diary of your day and to figure out retroactively what caused it.

• 2:02:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 2:02:55Speaker 03

  There's no other mechanic and it's so people don't know why, people don't know for what reason, people, some people think it's autoimmune. Some people think it's not. And it's a fascinating.

• 2:03:06Speaker 03

  So I have to carry medication all the time and I always recommended this.

• 2:03:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, this is the the prescription version of Truvaga, spelled T R U V A G A, is called GammaCore.

• 2:03:15Speaker 03

  Got it.

• 2:03:15Tim Ferriss?

  G A M M A C O R E. It's FDA cleared in the US for both acute treatment of migraine pain in adults and prevention of migraine episodic and chronic. A few practical points, the effect, evidence is real, but modest compared to top tier migraine medications like CGRP inhibitors appears to work best for people who treat attacks early, migraine with aura, patients who want to reduce medication use, those who can't tolerate tryptans and CGRPs.

• 2:03:44Speaker 03

  Speaking of those devices, by the way, have you guys seen there's some companies that are being now that there's sort of reinvention of input into computers. So for example, less keyboards, more voice, more like natural types of interactions with with technology and devices in general. There are these devices that are coming out. One of my friends demoed this to me. I think Apple just acquired a company where you just put sort of a small device that listens in this sort of region and without you actually saying anything, it can detect.

• 2:04:17Speaker 03

  You know, as if you were talking.

• 2:04:20Chris Williamson?

  Makes sense.

• 2:04:20Speaker 03

  Roughly, it's remarkable and you can imagine a lot of scenarios with this as as technology and input layers become much more natural, much more conversational. And you know, you don't have these affordances to speak all the time where imagine that device can effectively read what you want to say without you ever having to say it.

• 2:04:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:43Speaker 03

  And it lives roughly in this region can detect all these muscles.

• 2:04:45Chris Williamson?

  Any idea why it sat there to detect, is it as if you're moving your mouth but not talking?

• 2:04:51Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not sure. Let me, let me, let me just sidebar real quick.

• 2:04:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:57Tim Ferriss?

  Just because I want to make a safety point, we're talking about the relative safety profile of brain stimulation or neuromodulation with these devices. That does not mean anyone should DIY this stuff. You can, the brain, the brain.

• 2:05:08Chris Williamson?

  Stick a nine volt battery on your head?

• 2:05:10Tim Ferriss?

  The brain, the brain is incredibly sensitive. If you hit the wrong target, you can fuck yourself up or make your symptoms a lot worse. So do not DIY this, go to a decent clinic. For people who want to explore it, I have no stake in any of these. Acacia Clinic in Sunnyvale in California, Salience, which I think is in Dallas. They may have other locations. Owen Muir, M U I R, who's in New York. There are a couple of clinics that I know have very good reputations, but like work with somebody who knows these devices.

• 2:05:43Chris Williamson?

  No nine volt battery in a, one of those.

• 2:05:45Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 2:05:45Chris Williamson?

  Pads that people use for their, to get to give them apps. I was about to go home with a Duracell battery.

• 2:05:52Tim Ferriss?

  There's also, it's not, I don't think indicated for migraines. It's, I'm pretty sure it's specific to RA, to rheumatoid arthritis, but Set Point Medical has an implant.

• 2:06:02Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 2:06:02Tim Ferriss?

  About the size of a small omega three that they, it's like an outpatient procedure in the neck. And then it just stimulates like twice a day, the vagus nerve.

• 2:06:11Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 2:06:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yep. That was on the front, front, it was on the front cover of the New York Times, the day that I interviewed Kevin Tracy, who was involved with the development of that device. Yeah.

• 2:06:22Chris Williamson?

  Wow. And so they implant it directly into your neck.

• 2:06:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:25Chris Williamson?

  How do you recharge it? Induction?

• 2:06:27Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, I'm not sure exactly. Yeah, I mean, it does get, it does get.

• 2:06:33Speaker 03

  It's magnetic charging on your neck. Could you imagine?

• 2:06:36George Mack?

  On the device that kind of reads your thoughts, one thing you you um discover as you get more into meditation is just how sometimes your thoughts aren't even you. Like, the ultimate example, even if you've not experienced any form of meditation, would be like a song that's stuck in your head.

• 2:06:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:51George Mack?

  I wonder how the device would differ between a song that's stuck in your head and something that you actually want it to do. Because I remember a great meditation technique.

• 2:07:01Tim Ferriss?

  I'm just imagining my ruminating, given a microphone.

• 2:07:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:05Tim Ferriss?

  My ear.

• 2:07:06Speaker 03

  I think the distinction being that there's sort of this concept of mind reading and or expression of a thought. And the expression of a thought is typically, you know, when you when you're starting to speak it roughly, you would have to. It's not purely like a thought reader in some sense, you would have to have an intent.

• 2:07:24George Mack?

  Yes.

• 2:07:24Speaker 03

  Associated with it. To going back to your previous point on devices, though. My thesis is that the device that you'll probably wear when you interact with AI or whatever, if you want to, has not been invented yet. And it will have this combination of

• 2:07:41Speaker 03

  input, output, that is much more um less visible.

• 2:07:46Chris Williamson?

  Didn't, didn't OpenAI claim that they were going to have a three products or something? And obviously, they've got Johnny Ive and the guy that made the iPhone, the original iPhone. And then they bought his company, which was called.

• 2:07:57Speaker 03

  I O.

• 2:07:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I O. And then there was this very cool sexy video of him and Sam in a totally not fake bar somewhere.

• 2:08:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:08:05Chris Williamson?

  Having a conversation.

• 2:08:08George Mack?

  I think it'd be the AirPods.

• 2:08:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're they're actually building a phone, apparently.

• 2:08:12Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 2:08:12Speaker 03

  Um.

• 2:08:12Chris Williamson?

  They said three different things, and one of them is something that no one's ever seen before.

• 2:08:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:08:16Chris Williamson?

  Which makes maybe a lapel thing and a little button or something like that.

• 2:08:21George Mack?

  The the AirPod case makes the most amount of sense because we were already using them. People wear them 24/7. The AirPods uh, what's that stat around? If the AirPod was a startup, it'd be like one of the most.

• 2:08:31Chris Williamson?

  It's eighth, eighth in the world.

• 2:08:32Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, really? That's wild.

• 2:08:34Chris Williamson?

  It's remarkable. Just, just that alone.

• 2:08:36George Mack?

  And half that's me contributing to um.

• 2:08:38Chris Williamson?

  Should we talk about that?

• 2:08:39George Mack?

  Yeah, I've.

• 2:08:39Chris Williamson?

  We've never spoken about this.

• 2:08:40George Mack?

  I've uh.

• 2:08:42Chris Williamson?

  See if I can pull it up.

• 2:08:42Speaker 03

  Going back to your three devices thing, I think there's probably one device that is.

• 2:08:49Speaker 03

  An affordance that's kind of listening and or

• 2:08:51Tim Ferriss?

  Pass me your, wait, you were a raw dog that took a deer like, let's get rid of this free advertising.

• 2:08:57Speaker 03

  There is this sort of one device that probably listens to input in some mechanic or or or tries to process what you want. In perhaps possibly a new way that could be like a device that's kind of have a microphone or whatnot. There's another device where it's like a her type situation where he's wearing that earpiece and constantly speaking to it. And then maybe that third device is kind of this glanceable world, right? Where you have this phone.

• 2:09:22Speaker 03

  Turns out now, you know, applications are becoming less like people are using chat GPT or Claude for everything, right? Like you go, I want to set a timer. You can do that in chat GPT. You don't necessarily need a dedicated app. Maybe you want one or whatnot. But the idea of the app ecosystem being less valuable than it was before, given that

• 2:09:41Chris Williamson?

  Elon's big on this, right? He thinks that all apps are going to go away and your phone is just going to create whatever you need, whenever you need it.

• 2:09:48Speaker 03

  Roughly, exactly. And and I think generally

• 2:09:52Speaker 03

  today, it's possible to build that type of device without having this ecosystem effect that was necessary in the past.

• 2:09:59Chris Williamson?

  I wonder if that would open up a hole in the market because at the moment, the dominance has been pretty tough. Despite the fact that Apple have kind of shit the bed a lot, you know, they've the the phones have really started to peter out in terms of the progress, at least from what I know, this is a user. Like, yeah, I can zoom in 15x, I can zoom in 20x and

• 2:10:20Speaker 03

  At some point, it's like, it's a slab of glass and a combination of things. Like, what do you do?

• 2:10:24Chris Williamson?

  Slider, it's a bit, the screen's brighter or sharper or something, but it's less noticeable. You remember when it was what? The iPhone five to the iPhone 12 and each time it was a noticeable leap forward. Almost the same that's been happening with the the AI models, you know, that it seems to have started to at least in terms of noticeable total user experience for me, it seems

• 2:10:45Tim Ferriss?

  I think iOS gets worse every time I upgrade.

• 2:10:47Chris Williamson?

  The keyboard at the moment just fucking sucks.

• 2:10:51Tim Ferriss?

  It's so bad. But my, but they do have an incredible war chest. So what do you think?

• 2:10:59Chris Williamson?

  I've been against the guy with a massive pile of money.

• 2:11:02Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I'm just, what they can do is they can buy companies. So I'm wondering, I don't know, you have any thoughts on who they should buy?

• 2:11:09Speaker 03

  You know, there's, there's a group of people that think that Apple's like the smartest company because they've let the world sort of play itself out, people spending a lot of money. And they're just waiting to see where it hits and then effectively do what they do best, which is never enter the market first, but be the best.

• 2:11:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:30Speaker 03

  That's exactly what happened to cell phones or smartphones, exactly what happened to kind of AirPods. There's all these some, some wireless.

• 2:11:37Tim Ferriss?

  Do with the iPod two.

• 2:11:38Speaker 03

  iPod two. Yeah, the iPod was the first element of it, even the computer in some sense.

• 2:11:43Tim Ferriss?

  Plenty of MP3 players before that.

• 2:11:44Speaker 03

  They've saved all of this cost for CapEx, never spent anything like what Google.

• 2:11:50George Mack?

  Go forth and split test these products for us, my minions.

• 2:11:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:11:53George Mack?

  It's a ton of other companies.

• 2:11:54Speaker 03

  They effectively let others do the R and D work to a certain extent and then refine that world potentially. And, you know, there's an argument to be made that that is a.

• 2:12:04George Mack?

  You don't need to be first, you just need to be best. They also make, what, 20 billion per year from Google?

• 2:12:11Speaker 03

  For free.

• 2:12:11George Mack?

  Google search for free. So Google keep going up and up and up. So yeah, they're not gonna dabble with touching that, which is why Siri's still. What we haven't discussed is how much revenue you contribute to Apple on an annual basis. I think I'm on my 17th AirPods.

• 2:12:31Tim Ferriss?

  A lot because they're, because they're a slippery bar of soap.

• 2:12:35George Mack?

  Yeah, yeah. No, no, it's more, I've had a few stolen. I've, I don't like having things on me as well. So I'll just like leave things. So like the amount of times I've left them at Dean's.

• 2:12:44Tim Ferriss?

  Just a gift to the universe over and over again.

• 2:12:47George Mack?

  The most frustrating thing is, Tim, is you can see where they all are. So there's one in particular right now that's in Cameroon and I can see where his house is, right? So, no, no, I still have, no, because I'm a sad little man that I'm not willing to, I'm not willing to fly into Cameroon to confront the man, but I am willing to press the play sound button.

• 2:13:08Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. Do it at night while they're sleeping?

• 2:13:11George Mack?

  Yeah. Isn't there, isn't there a single AirPod that's in the, uh, uh, like WHO building? Yeah, that was, that was Catty's AirPods that were in the WHO building. Yeah, just one AirPod. It was in the single AirPod that he was playing this sound through from the WHO building in, in New York City. There you go. It's just there right now. Oh, he's in Ghana, he's in Ghana.

• 2:13:29Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:13:29George Mack?

  There we go. Eight minutes ago.

• 2:13:31Speaker 03

  Have you guys ever, uh, that's, that's incredible, but what, what a great, I mean, I never leave my house without my AirPods.

• 2:13:38George Mack?

  This is why I think it's. Such a power user.

• 2:13:41Speaker 03

  It's ridiculous.

• 2:13:42George Mack?

  Such a power user. Sounding like a broken record here, but I assume the device is a little, little pod thing that we have now. Headphones in, cameras in, but then it's almost you could have a, like a holographic screen. So people aren't on these glass screens as much and you can make it big, make it small. That feels inevitable.

• 2:13:58Speaker 03

  I mean, there is rumor that the next AirPods, like you said, do have visual, the cameras. And that's, that's crazy. If you think about it, you're walking around, there's sort of two spatially aware cameras around you.

• 2:14:09Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it's kind of like, uh, what was it? Dark Knight Returns or Dark Knight Rises when they had the cell phones.

• 2:14:14Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. And they mapped it, they mapped the entire city.

• 2:14:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. I mean, what do you think Apple's going to do with that data?

• 2:14:19George Mack?

  I don't understand how they're going to do the whole Neuralink thing that you mentioned of they will read your thoughts because of the fact that some thoughts I have, I didn't want to have. It wasn't me, but there's this meditation technique I once sat in, which is, it's a real cool one.

• 2:14:33Tim Ferriss?

  So it sounds like you're pretty serious in meditating.

• 2:14:35George Mack?

  Yes. Yeah. Um, it was originally to fight off a skin condition and then it ended up fixing. Fix that with AI. Yeah. At Gemini fixed that. So the story there was.

• 2:14:43Tim Ferriss?

  Gemini fixed your syphilis?

• 2:14:44George Mack?

  The, the, yeah. The, that's, uh, non-be fixed, my friend.

• 2:14:48Speaker 03

  AGI is here, man.

• 2:14:49George Mack?

  Sniffer gave me the syphilis.

• 2:14:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:51George Mack?

  No, um, the, I had a, I had subatomic domaritis for about two years.

• 2:14:57Tim Ferriss?

  Subatomic?

• 2:14:58George Mack?

  Sub-boric domatitis.

• 2:14:59Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. I was like, wait, what?

• 2:15:01George Mack?

  My face would break out like red and I wouldn't want to go outside the house. So I spoke to a few different doctors. A lot of them recommended topical steroid creams. Uh, a lot of them said it was because of stress. So I got deep into meditation. I stopped eating like so, such little sugar that I once flagged, I once got diagnosed with type one diabetes. Um, which was a complete false diagnosis.

• 2:15:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Type one is pretty hard.

• 2:15:22George Mack?

  Which is another side story.

• 2:15:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:23Speaker 03

  That's genetic.

• 2:15:24George Mack?

  But I want, then when I was away, no, I tracked my skin for years and nothing would work. Nothing would work. So when I was away on holiday, I just uploaded the file to Gemini and it just. The file? You mean a photo? Yeah. No, all the photos that I have. And it just said, oh, just put Nizoral shampoo on your face.

• 2:15:41Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:15:42George Mack?

  And it's never, it's never had an issue ever since.

• 2:15:43Tim Ferriss?

  So it was fungal?

• 2:15:44George Mack?

  Yes. So the biggest, the biggest recommendation I would give.

• 2:15:46Tim Ferriss?

  Nizoral is ketoconazole for people who are wondering, yeah.

• 2:15:49Speaker 03

  That's for dandruff.

• 2:15:49George Mack?

  And I do it once.

• 2:15:50Tim Ferriss?

  Say again.

• 2:15:51Speaker 03

  It's for dandruff.

• 2:15:52Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, it's also very effective for topical fungal infections.

• 2:15:56George Mack?

  I did it once every two weeks now and it's completely.

• 2:15:59Tim Ferriss?

  Fucking crazy.

• 2:15:59George Mack?

  It's completely gone. So any recommendation at home, like a practical thing would be just upload a photo of yourself to Gemini or Chat GPT and just say, hey, based off what you can see with my skin, recommend me moisturizers, recommend me everything and it will be better than anything you've done before.

• 2:16:14Tim Ferriss?

  What do you use Gemini for versus other models?

• 2:16:17George Mack?

  I'm, I'm a, an L L M whore, Tim.

• 2:16:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:20George Mack?

  Like I, I'm shifting.

• 2:16:22Speaker 03

  He's like the Andrew Huberman of L L M's.

• 2:16:25George Mack?

  Yeah, I'm shifting each time. Oh, but two, sorry, I didn't finish the story. So the meditation point there, there's a great question, um, which I ended up learning was asking your mind, what thought's going to come up next? And it's like, your mind gets a bit, it's almost this Mexican standoff. And the problem with these devices, I once asked myself that and my mind went quiet for six seconds. And then for whatever reason, there's this former Bayern Munich winger called Iron Robin, and it's just him checking in on the left foot in my head. And it's like, that, was that me? Why is that there? So if I have a Neuralink device, it's an interesting one of how does it know what was me versus what's just my monkey mind doing strange behaviors?

• 2:17:06Speaker 03

  You know, um.

• 2:17:07Tim Ferriss?

  I can't wait to see the first failed demos of, you know what I mean? Like these epic software demo fails. Someone gets up and it's just like twat, twat, twat, twat, twat. It's like, no, no, sorry, sorry.

• 2:17:18George Mack?

  Especially given that the likelihood of it being Elon to do the first presentation is quite high. A man with a mind that I don't think anybody wants to see broadcast out into public.

• 2:17:26Speaker 03

  Did you see that demo of the Cybertruck where he was on stage?

• 2:17:30George Mack?

  Smash the window.

• 2:17:30Speaker 03

  And he smashed the window. He's like, wait, that's not supposed to happen.

• 2:17:34George Mack?

  The best film I've watched all year, it's a British film. It's probably one of the best like storytelling examples I've ever heard. So people will know it from the Brits award. It was this horrific incident where Michael B. Jordan went on stage and somebody shouted the N word out. And it was this huge controversial incident, but what actually happened was it was a guy who has one of the most severe form of Tourette's. And he was at.

• 2:17:57Tim Ferriss?

  He was a subject of a film.

• 2:17:58George Mack?

  He was subject of a film. So he was at the BAFTAs. So the film is called I Swear and it's incredible because this guy grew up in Scotland, which is like. Think about all the stereotypes you have about England, like the further north you get, the more like harsher it essentially is.

• 2:18:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's like people from Aberdeen are some of the most like brutal people on the planet.

• 2:18:18George Mack?

  So this man grew up with extreme Tourette's in the seventies, eighties, England, when nobody knew what the condition was. So the film's amazing because it's just him like walking to the shops going fat twat and he goes, and he's just getting the shit beaten out of him and he can't explain what it is. So he's constantly getting into fights. There's a scene where he's walking his dog, and this is real. So he's walking his dog across the, about to go across a busy road and he loves this dog, but there's a car coming and he goes walk forwards now. And then he has to grab the dog. He's Tourette's.

• 2:18:49Chris Williamson?

  He's fighting against himself.

• 2:18:51George Mack?

  Yeah, he's fighting against himself. It's so good. It's such a good film.

• 2:18:55Tim Ferriss?

  Where can you see it?

• 2:18:56George Mack?

  If you just search, I swear.

• 2:19:00Chris Williamson?

  Fuck you. Fuck you.

• 2:19:03Tim Ferriss?

  So I missed it.

• 2:19:04Chris Williamson?

  Fuck you.

• 2:19:04George Mack?

  From living with Chris, the man's a bit of a boomer and I'll often like give him a recommendation and I'll go, he'll go, where can I see it? And if it's not on Netflix, he can't get it.

• 2:19:12Chris Williamson?

  No, no, no, no. That's not fair. That's not, that's not fair. And that's not true. But my response is what can I watch it on?

• 2:19:20George Mack?

  And I'll just say, Google it.

• 2:19:21Chris Williamson?

  Right. But that's a fair, I feel like this is a little bit like, here's a fantastic new restaurant. Okay. What street's it on? I just want a little bit more information. And the fact that you want me, knowing what you know, which is that you might understand what streaming service it's on, saying to me that I have to go and Google it when you could just say it's on Netflix and me and Tim, this side of the table, we just expect a little bit more decorum. You know what I mean?

• 2:19:45George Mack?

  This is why, this is why I want AGI to come because it gives me.

• 2:19:48Tim Ferriss?

  I'm so glad you brought this up, Chris.

• 2:19:50Chris Williamson?

  All right, all right, all right.

• 2:19:51Speaker 03

  Going back to the photo thing, do you guys know what people are utilizing chat GPT and whatnot for when they upload photos of themselves? Looks maxing. Well, that's interesting. Do you know Kobe's?

• 2:20:03Tim Ferriss?

  What do they, what?

• 2:20:04Speaker 03

  So they upload a set of photos. There's these apps on the app store too now that kind of do a wrapper experience. But the idea is that effectively, you know, you upload photos to Gemini or chat GPT and then it suggests things that you might want to do, whether it's.

• 2:20:16Tim Ferriss?

  Smash your cheekbones with this type of hammer.

• 2:20:18Speaker 03

  Medical procedure, you know, jaw surgery, having a symmetric face, even things like hairstyle make a huge difference or a beard or whatever.

• 2:20:27Tim Ferriss?

  Skip that section.

• 2:20:29Speaker 03

  And roughly, it's really interesting that people are doing this because obviously there's this huge graze of looks maxing and whatnot. And turns out huge use case for AI.

• 2:20:40Chris Williamson?

  Dude, check out COV. I've just sent this to you, Jared.

• 2:20:43Speaker 03

  Q O V.

• 2:20:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So look at this. So this is glow up without surgery. Get your personalized facial analysis and transformation.

• 2:20:50Tim Ferriss?

  Two thousand academic studies.

• 2:20:52Chris Williamson?

  So I know the science team behind it. The science team behind this are absolutely sick. So look at the guy in the right and then like you should be able to do a transition. You see how you can get the middle of the guy's face. You should be able to click on it. Yeah, exactly. So move it all the way to the right.

• 2:21:04George Mack?

  And you was worried about mean intent. Look at this.

• 2:21:06Chris Williamson?

  And then go to the left.

• 2:21:08Tim Ferriss?

  Wow. Got it. So it's like drive by shooting suspect to soap opera star.

• 2:21:14Chris Williamson?

  Exactly. Get more career opportunities, boost your self-confidence, make a stronger first impression, improve your dating life, enhance your quality of life. So basically it's.

• 2:21:22Tim Ferriss?

  Go, go, let me see the one on the left again.

• 2:21:24Chris Williamson?

  Go the swing it.

• 2:21:26Speaker 03

  She's really attractive.

• 2:21:27Tim Ferriss?

  I feel like that's one of those like Sandra Bullock. Oh, she takes off the glasses and walks out.

• 2:21:31Speaker 03

  She goes through. Yeah. You're like, wait, she nerded her hair off. That's all she did. Ah, she's shaped her face. But do it again, Jared. Show me.

• 2:21:38Chris Williamson?

  Slow it down. Go really slow.

• 2:21:40Speaker 03

  Fucking hell.

• 2:21:41George Mack?

  Really, really slow, slow, slow, slow.

• 2:21:43Speaker 03

  You know, this is just I R L Facetune, right?

• 2:21:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:21:47Speaker 03

  So if you, there's like Facetune has all of the Facetune. I don't, do you guys know what Facetune is?

• 2:21:51Tim Ferriss?

  I don't.

• 2:21:51Chris Williamson?

  I learned about it from Freyr India a couple of weeks ago.

• 2:21:53Speaker 03

  One of the most, it came out fair, a long time ago, Israeli company. And, and it's, it's just a easy way of manipulating the way that your face looks and you know, slims your jawline or whatever.

• 2:22:09Tim Ferriss?

  Gives you a way.

• 2:22:10Speaker 03

  Like as in on a photo, not, not actually. So, so it turns out every Instagram or, or before they post, anytime people post photos, they typically went through the same workflows and Facetune was kind of a, you know, just a bunch of tools that you can utilize. And now with AI, holy crap. I mean, the possibilities are quite limitless. And so, you know, it can regenerate that photo. And so at the bottom, there are all these like AI filters and. People use them so, so, so much. And often I heard this story where one of my friends met somebody from Instagram and, you know, they had, they had all these photos and she looked nothing like her self-real life.

• 2:22:53Chris Williamson?

  Well, let me give you this from Freya. When

• 2:22:56Tim Ferriss?

  From Freya?

• 2:22:57Chris Williamson?

  Freya, India is a girl, a writer who just released a book called Girls.

• 2:23:01Tim Ferriss?

  The Nordic god?

• 2:23:03Chris Williamson?

  She does look a little bit like that blonde hair. She's like the, what would, what's the female equivalent of the Uber mensch? Uberfroing or whatever it's called?

• 2:23:10Tim Ferriss?

  The phone?

• 2:23:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. She's that. Yeah. She, she was telling me that when groups of young girls are out and they're taking photos at a party, everybody fights to be the one whose phone is used to have the photo taken because that means that they're the one that's in charge of the face tuning.

• 2:23:28Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:23:29Chris Williamson?

  So that they can work on themselves a little bit more.

• 2:23:32Speaker 03

  I know, I know, I know. It's actually, it's actually a huge social faux pas if you post a picture where you look good and the other person doesn't.

• 2:23:40Chris Williamson?

  That is stitching, that is stitching your mate up a little bit. You know, there's a famous English footballer called Ashley Cole. Can you just search Ashley Cole squad photo? And this, how long's this? 10 years? Yeah, it was when he was at Roma. So it's, and he's retired. Do you want to tell a story? Well, it's just a squad photo. It's, it's one of those I know it when I see it ideas, I guess. But it's just a football photo of the entire Roma team. And Ashley Cole, who's this Brit, is like trying to mingle with these Italians. It's like on top left. Iconic. Yeah, top left. Cause he's just awkwardly leaning on the outside. So then he gets memed everywhere. This became one of the biggest memes in the world. For a long time, it's a team that looks like they're so close.

• 2:24:22Tim Ferriss?

  What's the headline? Scroll down a little bit?

• 2:24:26Chris Williamson?

  Ashley Cole appears to be an outcast in an incredibly awkward Roma team picture. The amount of times me and Chris have been out with like a group of guys and I'll do the Ashley Cole like two yards. Moves off to one side, ruins it. Absolutely ruins it. All right, boys, let's bring this one into land. You all rule. Tim, what have you got coming up? Where should people go to check out your things?

• 2:24:43Tim Ferriss?

  You can find everything at tim.blog. I'd say that's probably the easiest. Yeah, check out the newsletter. It's been going for like 10, 12, 14, God knows how many years.

• 2:24:52Chris Williamson?

  What was that one, that most recent article about self-improvement? What I learned from however many years of self-improvement?

• 2:25:00Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, yes. Yeah, that was, it's called the self-help trap. What I learned after 20 years of.

• 2:25:07Tim Ferriss?

  Quote unquote, yeah, improving myself.

• 2:25:09Chris Williamson?

  That's awesome.

• 2:25:09Tim Ferriss?

  That's, yeah, that's a long form. That's on the blog, 12, 10, 12 pages. Tim.blog/Friday, sign up for the newsletter. A lot of the stuff that we're talking about. Like, go back if you want some, also, another reason to check out Neurostimulation, go back and look at the Brainsway stock graph for the last two or three years.

• 2:25:28Tim Ferriss?

  So that type of stuff you'll learn about before other people.

• 2:25:30Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 2:25:31Tim Ferriss?

  Not, I'm not a registered investment advisor, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 2:25:34Chris Williamson?

  You may lose money, yeah.

• 2:25:37Speaker 03

  No, appreciate you guys having me on.

• 2:25:40Speaker 03

  Our, our app is called Sky, S K Y E, and it's a fun little experience. It's kind of a new way to experience your phone. It's kind of ironic that we're, you know, I talked about that, having, you know, we talked about the digital detox or whatever, but our goal is to kind of really make you stop using as much as you would otherwise by surfacing the things that you might care about before, such that you don't go into this doom scrolling world or whatever. Imagine something that exists there. It's there when you need it, it's gone when you don't, and we don't really have anything else. So it's a fun little thing, we, a couple people, and we've got tens of thousands of people on a waitlist right now.

• 2:26:22Speaker 03

  So we're trying to fulfill that. Inference is very expensive, but it's been the time of my life to build this. I'm, I guess I, I love technology so much and I love interfaces and I love thinking about the world with respect to how the future might be in terms of people interacting with the, with the, with the technology in a, in a meaningful way, not necessarily in a doom scrolling sort of this world that we've kind of built. So I don't know where we'll go with that, but it's been, it's been an incredible time building. And what a time to be alive. As if you're, if you're any type of builder today, it is probably one of the most remarkable times I've ever witnessed. I'm baffled every day.

• 2:27:03Speaker 03

  And so it's been so much fun and we're just getting started. So I'm, I'm really excited for that.

• 2:27:08Chris Williamson?

  And at Signal on X with two L's, S I G N U L L, if you want to see you call out the Xbox CEO a little bit more.

• 2:27:15Speaker 03

  That's pretty hilarious. I wonder if she's gonna watch this.

• 2:27:17Tim Ferriss?

  Tiklau.com/Signal.

• 2:27:20Speaker 03

  Sniffies. Sniffies. Sorry, I need to take that username from that app.

• 2:27:24George Mack?

  Match with me there. Myendhighagency.com/books. If you want to get a breakdown of all my best books, you told me to do this. There's going to be a book breakdown, a list of a lot of different books, but the personal one of Oblomov, a Russian man from the 18th century, who the first 50 pages are about him getting out of bed. So there's more resources like that. Get my best books and articles. That's it.

• 2:27:47Speaker 03

  Okay. All right.

• 2:27:48George Mack?

  Let's go.

• 2:27:48Speaker 03

  See you next time, everyone. Yo. Cheers, gentlemen. Yes. There we go. Yeah. Good fun.

• 2:27:55Speaker 04

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